Our Stories
Hill Stories
By Stew | posted 07/15/2010
"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden." (Matthew 5:14)
About a month ago, I saw a hawk on the side of a hill. The hawk had a wounded wing, so rather than fly up the hill, it hopped. The hawk hopped until he reached a three-rail fence near the top of the hill, then he "flew" to the top rail where he perched himself to scan the hill below. I approached the hawk to get a better look, but I spooked him, and he spread his good and bad wings and soared downhill with a leftward limping veer to land on a tree at the bottom. I felt bad for the hawk in two ways. First, the poor guy had just hopped up the hill and gained a perspective on the world, but then I had come along and his vantage point was lost. Second, I realized that this poor bird had been hurt and could no longer do what it was meant to do, which was to soar hundreds of feet above searching for prey, and then to swoop down to grab its prey to eat. That’s what hawks do. That’s how they live. Hawks are born to fly, not to hop.
Over the next few weeks, I saw the hawk maybe a dozen times, perched on a tree or a fence post, surveying the land below. I don’t usually have a soft spot in my heart for hawks, but because of his wounded wing, this one was different. I was worried he was going to starve to death.
So I came home one day and I noticed the hawk on the ground at the foot of the fence. I guessed that he was now so weak and wounded that he didn’t have the energy to fly to the top rail of the fence. I shouldn’t have been so worried. The poor hawk was feasting on a huge rabbit that he had caught. This hawk was still a hawk.
Two days ago, another hill story. The well stopped working, so to find the problem in the pipe, we dug with a pick and shovel down to the pipe that flowed out of the well house which stood atop the new well which had been dug a few years earlier by previous owners. We then followed the pipe a few feet up hill from the well house by continuing to dig and expose the pipe. We expected the line eventually to tee both to the left and right rather than go on pointlessly up the hill.
But we were having trouble finding any tee. The line kept going up the hill and our trench was getting deeper and deeper. We chuckled at the thought that the line might go up ten yards to the pipe of the old well. I swung the pick to extend the trench. It came down in the hard dirt, but it slid down and knifed through the loose earth into the PVC pipe. Water gushed! The adrenalin in my heart knew that this spill was 100 times bigger than the BP oil spill! I let out the same yelp I’ll use someday when I’m shot in combat or fall off a mountain into an abyss. When I yelped, my coworker, a father of three, had his hand on the rusted pipe of the old deactivated well (which was actually the pipe of the new well). The supposedly deactivated well then activated instantaneously to pump water in torrents out the pipe I had just punctured, quickly creating a ditch full of mud. When my coworker above touched his hand to the pipe of the old well, he could feel and hear the electrical system in the well kick on, giving him the distinct impression that an electrocution had just occurred. Fortunately, not true. But almost everything we had based our decisions on was wrong: The well house was over the old well, not the new. The water flowed downhill from the well above, not up. The old well was the new well. The new well was the old one. If only we had known that the source of the water we were seeking was up the hill in the old well, then our fruitless, misguided, counter-productive, and nearly electrifying efforts might have been averted.
So what do these stories have in common? And what do they have to do with Christ? Well, if you climb high enough on a hill you can get the right perspective. The hopping hawk got high enough up the hill to get the perspective he needed to continue to be the hawk he really was.
The two workers in the ditch hadn’t really gained the right perspective on their water problem. They thought the water flowed up the hill and not from a higher source. In fact they didn’t even believe in the higher source! Shame. But eventually they had their come-to-Jesus moment.
Oh, and remember the story about the guy who gave the sermon from the best perspective of all, up on the mountain top? He said, "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden." He wanted us to all have the perspective that comes from being at the top of a hill, but he knew too that having that perspective makes us examples for all who can see us from below--just as Jesus was an example for all of us on the hill called Calvary.
Stew can be reached via email here.
