Matthew 7:13-14 13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
The path at the end of the uphill runway was invisible to the naked eye from three hundred feet away, down at the river end.
Someone had led the Indians to chop down all the trees and level the straightaway of all stones and roots, burned what was left behind, asking only of the tribe folk to maintain the strip so they could get their supplies. Once in a while a plane would fly in with two barrels of Avgas to set off to one side for the future.
But up on that high end, there was an opening, no more wide than a man's shoulders, where lots of villagers had padded the earth and beaten the grass down. You couldn't see it even from a hundred feet away. Nothing marked it.
I ran early in the morning to keep my fitness up, barefoot in the machete cut vegetation, merely to return the same way over and over again to keep my young heart fit, and then I saw it...the path in the jungle. It stopped me short. Why had I never noticed this before? Curiosity grabbed me and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to explore the dark green before me.
Twice I walked through the opening, once seeing a small deer as surprised as I was, both of us standing stock still for a moment anteceding its escape a few seconds into the silent introduction. The second, a small tapir snuffed the dirt in the way, oblivious to my presence as it rooted for insects. I didn't bother to bring either back to the village. Without tools, I was just another white skinned kid unprepared to hunt.
The "invisible" gate had opened for me a place to explore and I returned several times to peer into the depths of the forest. The life behind it quietly ensconced many creatures, I knew. But I was most afraid of the Green Tree snake so infamous for dropping from branches and aggressively killing hunters. Nope, there was exploration enough in the first hundred feet of the opening. One could easily disappear in a few meters.
Salvation is like that. It's a very small gate. You have to stop and exit your life in order to find it, and finding is like a needle in a haystack. You really gotta wanna or the available life doesn't advertise its miracle of transformation.
