This trip into the Himalayas, though, The Medici Code would be much more rigorous than any I had been on before. It would require eight months of training. Nine of us would be making the journey together, and in a group of outdoorsmen I was the odd one out. This is how I saw the trip: how far am I willing to go to share the Good News of Jesus?
Randy, our leader, told us in our first meeting that we would have to hike four to five hours at a time with up to fifty pounds on our back at an altitude of twelve thousand feet. I had no idea what I had agreed to do! After buying my gear, it was time to start training. I worked my way up from walking with an empty backpack to filling it with a large landscape rock from our flower bed. I carried the rock in my backpack while I walked and, eventually, did the stair climber at my gym. After only a few minutes on the stair climber I was very fatigued. My personal trainer, manager of the club, and good friend Jim stopped by and asked a question I will never forget: "So, how much weight do you have in your backpack?"
I answered with, "I'm not sure, but it has to be close to fifty pounds." He suggested I weigh it on the scales and I agreed, wanting to show off my prowess. To my dismay, the scales said that rock weighed thirteen pounds. Could this be some joke? Could the scales be broken? This meant I had thirty-seven pounds to go. This is impossible, I thought.However, God has a history of making the impossible possible, and sometimes it is in the places we feel the least prepared and most vulnerable that God does his greatest works through us. I did complete the training, and six months later, our team left for the Himalayas.