As I look out across the landscape of personal lives, businesses, and ministries I am seeing a shedding taking place. Where once there was an abundance, I now see an off-loading taking place of all but the necessary cargo required for the continuance of the journey. 

When my ancestors on the Applegate Wagon Train of 1846 passed through the Rogue Valley in Oregon where Jan and I live, unknown to them they would soon enter a narrow and almost impassable canyon south of present-day Canyonville, Oregon. The primitive trail runs along Interstate 5 in southern Oregon. Each time I drive that stretch of the freeway I become sober and silent thinking of my ancestors struggling through the narrow, boulder-strewn creek bottom being pounded by the same storm system that horribly impacted the Donner Party in California.

One witness to the passage through the canyon said the creek bottom looked like a retreating army had passed through offloading any cargo that added unnecessary weight to their already stressed oxen. It took almost a week for the wagon train to travel less than ten miles. People died in the passage. Family treasures were offloaded and abandoned to simply stay alive.

All the drastic efforts and sorrowful choices that were made on that journey had a single purpose – to make it to a land of promise where a new life could begin. If there has been unexpected losses in your life, losses where you had to make choices you had never considered when the journey began, those losses are not powerful enough to rob you of the promise God made to you if you simply keep moving forward in faith – a faith empowered by hope. The hope of what lay ahead for my pioneering ancestors gave them the ability to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving through the canyon and the afflicting storm. That hope is the same hope that is available for all of us today when it feels like our strength and resources have been depleted and the completion of the journey is in jeopardy.

Many times, while driving along I-5 over the same route as the Applegate Wagon Train of 1846, I imagine the prayers of desperation and loss that were being prayed as heart-wrenching choices had to be made. Today, I am hearing similar prayers from people I know and love. God is answering those prayers by providing the strength people need to move through personal canyons of pain and loss in the hope that someday they will step into a wide and open valley where a new life awaits them. Their arrival will be the fruit of a labor of faith that was empowered by the strength of hope.