It was somewhat of an “Outward Bound” program-a survivalist experience carried to the extreme. A dozen hikers, with three experienced guides, were braving the Utah desert (in July!) to “test themselves physically and mentally.”
And they were tested! If you can imagine trudging along in the blazing sunshine in one hundred-degree heat for ten hours, with no access to food or water and only occasionally a little thin shade! It was a real test, and a very real danger.
It has been estimated that an average person walking in the desert should drink three gallons of water to replenish the water in his body. Failing this, his body water will slowly disappear and he will become severely dehydrated. But this extreme experience required the hikers to walk ten hours from one water hole to the next-ten long hours.
The one cup of water they drank at the start was soon only a memory. The Utah sun blazed hotter and hotter-and hotter. As the temperature rose in the air, it rose also in the hikers’ bodies. At first the temperature rose slowly. A hiker may feel only light-headed, tired, perhaps a little disoriented. He can be saved then if water is given. But once he goes too far, his temperature too high, pulse and respiration too slow—water can no longer save him.
David Buschow was one such victim. It had been a long, hard struggle in the fierce heat: trudge, trudge, trudge—stumble, stumble, fall—get up and stagger forward again. Now he had to be lifted up after the falls.
At last there was shouting ahead. The first members of the party had reached the goal: a cave that shaded a small source of water. Shouts of exhilaration carried back to the slower walkers, urging them on.
But Dave? He had fallen once more-face down in the desert dirt. The guide said, “I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, he was gone.”
Gone. Dead. Dead in sight of the goal. Only three hundred feet ahead was the life-giving water, but Dave was never to taste of it. The goal was just ahead, but hopelessly out of his reach. It is a sad, sad story.
But far, far worse is happening every day, happening all around us. So many others have tried—have struggled—have suffered to reach a goal—only to fall short at the end. There are those who have worked for salvation, have spent a lifetime in doing “good things,” or working toward self-improvement, only to find at the last that it was not enough. One cannot reach heaven by climbing!
And it was all so unnecessary. The “water of life” was offered freely, without cost. The Lord Jesus Himself promised that “whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:1414But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:14)).
That water of life is offered freely, not obtained by a long and bitter struggle through the deserts of this world, but by a simple acceptance of that wonderful gift that God offers to the thirsty.