Leave No Trace

       Last week I listened to a podcast about men living in prison hospice. Men with no families, no friends, and no hope. The interviewer referred to them as “men whose only future is to disappear without leaving a trace.”

       That phrase – without a trace – haunted me for days.

       It’s a familiar phrase to me, even if I know it mostly in another context. Leave No Trace is a concept in camping, hiking, and backpacking. It encourages us to leave minimal impact when outdoors in order to preserve and protect the wildness and the beauty. “If you pack it in, pack it out.”

       But all I could think about after listening to the podcast was my fear of leaving no trace in life, leaving no trace on the world, leaving no lasting impact and nothing meaningful.

       One of our go-to movies, The Bourne Supremacy, has a heartbreaking scene when Jason Bourne burns all the evidence of his girlfriend and their life together, making it harder for the bad guys to find him again. He wanted to disappear.

       I’ve watched this scene many times, and it always makes me sad that he destroyed the traces of his life. It’s the opposite of how I want to live. I hope to leave lots of evidence that tells what God has done for me. Not to be famous or well-known, but to leave a wide wake of changed lives.

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       I once sat through a Christmas dinner for Greathouse Elementary School where Cyndi taught 5th grade. I was seated next to another teacher’s spouse, a man whose life dreams could be summed up by his desire to live completely “off the grid.” He wanted to get away from it all, be away from it all, disappear, and depend only upon himself. He rambled on and on during the entire dinner and through most of the congratulation speeches and gifts.

       He was oblivious to the fact that not only could I have not cared less about his off-the-grid dream, but it was also the opposite of how I want to live any part of my own life. But I couldn’t get away from him without abandoning Cyndi, who was sitting on my other side, so I listened to all of it.

       In my book Practicing Faith, I told the story of a young Louis L’Amour, about a time when he was hired to guard a mine that lay in a basin at the end of thirty-odd miles of winding, one-lane dirt road in remote southern California. L’Amour’s boss dropped him off in front of a concrete bunkhouse and drove away, leaving Louis all by himself. He wrote, “It was not Walden Pond. There was no water here except what came from a well. There were no forests. There wasn’t a tree within miles.” But there were boxes of books left by the previous occupant, and Louis L’Amour devoured them. He said the loneliness never affected him because he was so busy reading.

       Well, that sounded attractive to me. Minimal obligations, plenty to eat and drink, and unlimited time to read, go for long runs, think, and write.

       It also sounded lonely and incomplete. I wouldn’t be happy living that way for long. Besides the fact that I couldn’t be happy without Cyndi, I’m never totally happy learning and studying and analyzing unless I have an opportunity to share what I’ve learned. It isn’t enough to do something; I want to tell my stories afterward. Somehow sharing is part of the learning process, as if I won’t have room to learn more unless I pass along what I know.

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       How do you change the world, how do you leave a widening wake of changed lives, how do you speak grace and wisdom into young men’s hearts, living all by yourself off the grid. That isn’t who I want to be. Do you?

       I want to be completely engaged in the lives of other people, sharing stories that put God’s truth within reach. I want to be firmly planted in the grid, changing the grid, changing the future.

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How about you? What will the world miss if you don’t tell your story?

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“I run in the path of Your commands, for You have set my heart free.”
Psalm 119:32

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