I love caves.
I was in elementary school when I had my first chance to experience a real limestone cavern. I joined my family on a stroll through Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and I was hooked for life.
More than 4,000 caves stretch for hundreds of miles beneath my home state of Indiana. The vast majority are non-commercial and off the beaten path, which means that spelunkers or “wild cavers” are on their own when it comes to lights, equipment, and safety.
I have crawled, climbed, chimneyed, and sloshed through chilly subterranean streams at a number of those sites, heading underground at least once every year for four decades.
Hoosier caves maintain a steady year-round temperature of 54 degrees, which means July spelunking expeditions are refreshingly cool, while January adventures feel miraculously warm.
Caves are rugged, fascinating, and full of unexpected twists and turns. They often feature blind crickets, sightless fish, and bats that use sonar to effortlessly navigate pitch darkness. Most caverns aren’t as beautiful as the ones featured on the cover of National Geographic, but even modest cave formations are always worth seeing.
Since many underground corridors are little more than narrow sieves through hundreds of feet of limestone bedrock, caving is not for the claustrophobic. I feel blessed to be a claustromaniac – someone who enjoys the feeling of being closed in or squeezed into tight places. In one of my favorite caves, it’s necessary to do a belly crawl for 30 feet through a mostly water-filled, two-foot-tall passage. You remove your helmet and tilt your head sideways to catch a breath of air.
It doesn’t get much better than that.
I love caves. But I also fear caves.
Water – the same natural force that carves out all those rooms and passageways – can make caverns exceedingly dangerous. “Wet” caves are vulnerable to flash floods, potentially trapping spelunkers for hours or days.
I once guided a group of 20 high school kids into a cave after rain had been falling for hours on end. I was pretty sure the cave was safe. But “pretty sure” doesn’t cut it when it comes to spelunking safety. That trip was almost a half century ago, but I still shudder in bed sometimes late at night, grateful to God that the number of kids who exited that cave was the same number that went in.
The National Park Service, in order to maximize the comfort and safety of visitors to America’s most popular caves, provides level paths, staircases, elevators, bright lights, and a snack bar at the end of the journey.
Spelunking, by contrast, is inherently risky. It’s possible to slip and fall into crevices. It’s easy to twist an elbow or wrench a knee. On one occasion one of my good friends, an experienced caver, was overcome by hypothermia. It took us an hour to help him get back outside.
If you love caves, you also need to fear caves – to cultivate a deep-seated respect for the untamed natural word. There’s no contradiction in that.
The same thing is true when it comes to the realm of the Spirit.
To put it simply, I love God. But I also fear God.
In multiple places, the Bible calls us to an appropriate fear – a deep-seated respect for the untamed God that will lead us to make wise decisions concerning the conduct of our lives. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10).
It’s notable that Scripture never once tells us to fear the devil. We are not to fear evil. There is no need to fear death. Jesus tells us not to be afraid of people who are seriously intent on harming us (Matthew 10:26-31).
But spiritual health is all about cultivating an appropriate fear of God. C.S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, points out several times that Aslan – the giant lion who represents Christ in that fictional domain – is not a tame lion.
Nor is the God who is really there.
Healthy fear is not to be confused with spiritual paralysis or a sense of servile terror. “Fearing God” means choosing to take God seriously – embracing with joy his promises of mercy and grace, even while heeding his warnings when we're tempted to succumb to disastrous choices.
To paraphrase the fourth century theologian Augustine of Hippo, the early Church’s first great thinker, life really comes down to just two choices: We can either fear God or fear everything else.
Take it from a claustromaniac:
Loving and respecting the Most High God is the very best way to negotiate life’s tight spots.
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