I had an e-mail that said: “You may not believe in God, but God believes in you.” And it reminded me that the last time I heard those words was on a Canadian mountain in the aftermath of a forest fire.
They were spoken by a preacher from Saskatchewan who was reading his Bible by moonlight among the burning embers, and for some reason it stands out in my memory.
We had been rounded up from our jobs in the sawmill by the forest rangers along with every other able-bodied man in the area to fight a forest fire which had broken out some miles away and was heading our way at full speed.
Taken by truck to a base camp we were split into teams and sent into the hills, and for the next few days we worked twelve hour shifts in the blazing heat, digging ditches and putting out spot fires with metal piss tanks strapped to our backs. At the end of each shift a truck would come and take us back to town. But this particular day nobody came, and at nightfall we found ourselves on the side of the mountain in the cold and dark.
So we lit a fire, and Dwayne got out his Bible.
He was a Pentecostal preacher and new to the area. In his spare time he was building his own church in the middle of nowhere. It was his field of dreams. When it was built he would simply start preaching and people would come, he was certain of it.
He told me he had taken the previous weekend off from building his church to butcher some turkeys.
He didn’t specify whether this qualified as work or pleasure, and there on the mountain in the middle of the night I didn’t feel inclined to ask. But I found his mindset fascinating.
“You were born a hundred years too late, Dwayne. You should be driving a covered wagon.”
“Oh, how so?”
“You’re like a pioneer. You’re new to the territory, you’re building your own church, you spend your time butchering things, you’re fighting a forest fire and you’re sitting here in the wilderness reading your Bible. Tell me you’re not Jimmy Stewart.”
He chuckled.
“I guess this is pretty different from where you were raised.”
“Just a bit. What are you reading?”
“The Ten Commandments.”
“That’s a coincidence. There’s a burning bush over there.”
I meant it as a joke, but he got up anyway, ambled over to where a stump was still smouldering, and kicked it a couple of times.
“It’s out now.”
“Do you have a favourite commandment, Dwayne?”
“A favourite?”
“Yeah, one that you hope God would never abolish. One that really stands out for you.”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Me neither, but I’ll tell you the one I don’t like. Adultery. I think that should be allowed.”
That stopped him in his tracks.
“Adultery should be allowed? You think adultery is OK?”
“I was only joking.”
“Adultery is no joke.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“It destroys families.”
“Of course it does.”
There was an awkward silence, so I thought I might as well push it.
“Actually, there’s one thing I’ve never quite understood about the ten commandments.”
“Oh?”
“If you break a commandment you’re a sinner, right?”
“Right.”
“Even if you keep the other nine, you’re still a sinner. So if you break one commandment, you might as well break them all.“
He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.
“You don’t believe in God, do you?”
“Not really, no.”
Then, with what appeared to be genuine pity, he said: “Well, God believes in you.”
I felt mildly irritated by this. It seemed like a cheap shot (unlike the adultery crack, of course).
“Maybe so, but why does he always get other people to tell me that? He never tells me himself.”
At this, he closed his Bible.
“There’s a story about a man who falls over a cliff, and on the way down he grabs hold of a root. He’s hanging there by this root, and he’s hollering to high heaven, ‘Help me, God! Please, help me!’
And God says: ‘Sure, I’ll help. What do you want me to do?’
The guy says: ‘Save me. Get me down from here.’
God says: ‘OK, trust me, and let go of the root.’
After a pause the guy says: ‘Is there anybody else up there?’”
At this, Dwayne gave me his best checkmate smile. “You've just got to let go of that root.”
That was thirty years ago, and I’m still looking for a suitable cliff.