Hinds' Feet in High Places

   

Hinds’ Feet in High Places

What a beautiful simile! ‘Hinds’ feet on high places!’ Two scriptural passages sing this most beautiful song: “He makes my feet like hinds’ feet, and setteth me upon my high places,” Psalm 18:33 (KJV). And, “The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places,” Habakkuk 3:19 (KJV). It speaks of mountain-top spiritual experiences, where we get just a glimpse of the glorious heaven and the throne of the Lord and him communicating with us! One can live on this one second or one minute experience for months and years on end. Whenever one feels down in the dumps, this vision will play in our minds and one gets energized and plunge back into the work given by the Lord with redoubled energy. How wonderful and how marvelous!

The missionary, Hannah Hurnard writes an autobiographical allegory, “Hinds’ Feet on High Places,” tracing the devotional life of a Christian from salvation to maturity. (hind is a red female mountain deer). Hannah was working in Jerusalem as a missionary and wrote this book in 1955, explaining in poetic language, how a Christian is transformed from being an unbeliever to immature believer and finally to a mature believer, having a daily close walk with the Lord with abundant joy and peace, not in heaven, but on earth itself. It is a victorious Christian life lived on earth. She sings the Songs of Solomon, repeatedly as an allegory where the Shulamite girl delights her groom, who calls her, “Open to me, my sister, my dove, my love, my perfect one,” (Song of Solomon, 5:2). She goes in search of him in his absence and finally is united with him in marriage.

Hannah was born in 1905 in Colchester, England to wealthy Quaker parents. She spent around 50 years in Jerusalem, until 1948 when Israel was reborn as a nation, having willingly surrendered her life to the Lord, to be shaped according to His will. She suffered from two terrible handicaps, one, she was stammering badly as she spoke, which made her an introvert and second, she had terrible fear of everything. She would never go alone anywhere, and had become a rebel though born and brought up by religious parents. But when she was nineteen years old, she attended a convention at Keswick in 1924 with her father and there she surrendered her stammering tongue to the Lord; he healed her of it, equipping her to go to Palestine and work among Jews. She died in 1990 in Florida, USA, where she was under treatment for her illness. Shall we turn to see what lessons we could learn from her experiences and her writing?

The heroine of the allegorical novel is ‘Much-Afraid,’ an orphan girl living in a small village called ‘Much-trembling,’ in the ‘Valley of Humiliation,’ with her relatives, the ‘Family of Fearings,’ living scattered all around her. She had taken employment under the Chief Shepherd as a shepherdess and took care of his sheep. This was not liked by her relatives, who hated the Chief Shepherd. They were trying to influence her to give up that work and to marry her cousin ‘Craven Fear,’ an abominable creature and settle down. When she refused, they forced her, almost abducting her. She escapes and runs to the Shepherd, who was waiting for her at the pool where they water the sheep. He offers to take her to ‘High Places,’ which is at the border of his Father’s Kingdom, the ‘Realm of Love.’ He also promises to make her feet like hinds’ feet, so she can skip and go leaping on the mountains and reach the High Places. But she will have to leave her family and cottage at the valley and journey along the path that he chooses for her, which would be a long way off and a difficult path too, the mountains being steep and dangerous. She will have to be changed completely and given a new name too. Was she willing?

She professes her wilful acceptance of the proposal and starts off with the Shepherd. First, he wants to plant the seed of true Love in her heart, so that when it grows and is ready to blossom, he can give her the hinds’ feet so she can come along with him to the High Places, and be loved. She agrees and he slips a sharp seed into her heart. It pained. He explains that to love would be to put her under the power of the loved one, and become vulnerable to pain. They start of for the High Places. On the way he teaches her that she must humble herself like the flowers that blossomed under their feet. These small flowers blossom and spread their love to all, unmindful of whether they are loved back or not. Human love expects to be loved in return; there is a longing to be loved and admired by the lover. The Love for which the Shepherd planted the seed in her heart will enable her to love even when she is not loved. Of course her seed has not yet blossomed. It would take time.

They come to a water fall where the water is falling down and rushing towards the valley, singing all the way, happy and cheerful, as it went down and down. The Shepherd explains that the river starts in High Places and journeys down to the lowest place in the world, poring itself in self-giving. As the Shepherd cannot accompany Much-Afraid all the way, he selects two dear companions for her, named ‘Sorrow’ and ‘Suffering.’ She hated them, but as she had promised the Shepherd that she will abide by his will, she accepts to go with them. On the way, her old relatives come and sow doubts in her mind, saying the Shepherd will not really take her to the High Places, but will abandon her on the way, and that she will have to return to the valley with them. In spite of the assailing doubts she continues the journey.

The path suddenly turns around to a desert instead of going up to the mountains. She refuses to move on, argues and calls the Shepherd that he is contradicting himself by making her go through a desert when he has said that he would take her to the mountains. The Shepherd asks her to trust him and to make an altar and place her rebelling will on it as an offering. With trembling hands she does it and a fire reduces it to ashes, but a stone was found left there and she is asked to take and keep it in her pouch as a memorial. She would collect 11 more such stones from the other altars where she is asked to surrender her other unwanted baggage.

In the desert they pass through Egypt and the pyramids. Shepherd takes her inside. In the ground floor workers were threshing grains and grinding them to powder. He explains that his people also are threshed and ground to a flour so that they might become bread for the use of others. In the next floor a potter was working with clay. Shepherd asks Much-Afraid, Can’t he do with her as the potter does with the clay so that she can shape her as per his will (Jeremiah 18:6)? Then he takes her to the highest floor where gold was being smelted and refined of all its impurities. Shepherd tells her that his rarest and choicest jewels and finest gold are those who have been refined in the furnace of Egypt. Near her hut she picks up a flower, ‘Acceptance-with-Joy’ and vows to be one. She collects her second pebble.

After the desert, the path she was following led her sea shore. She observes a cove there which was empty but soon filled with the rising tide. She realized though she was empty as the cove and was waiting for His time to be filled to the brim with the flood-tide of love. She collects another stone in memory of this transformation. Again her relatives ‘Resentment,’ ‘Bitterness,’ ‘Self-pity,’ and ‘Pride’ pursue her and taunt her saying she is stupid to trust this Shepherd who demands everything from her and gives nothing in return except sorrow, suffering, ridicule and shame. She plugs her ears with cotton so that she would not hear their poisonous suggestions. When she was alone Pride caught her and she cries for her Shepherd, who comes instantly and relieves her. She gets a stone to remember Pride being toppled. She is asked to wait patiently for the Shepherd to fulfil his promises to her.

Again instead of leading to the mountains, the path leads her to a desert. She couldn’t believe it. As she stands stupefied, Shepherd appears and asks her to lay her whole will as a burnt offering on an altar. She obeys and gets another stone as keep-sake. The seed planted in her heart has taken root and is growing slowly but steadily. When it blossomed Shepherd had promised to give her hinds’ feet and take her on the High places to enter the Kingdom of Love. She is thrilled. She is now led to the very precipice, to climb the steep mountains. She watches a hart and hind leaping from rock to rock and climbing higher. She refuses to go further, for it is sure death for her to leap like that. Her cousin Craven Fear shows up and promises her to take her back to the valley; she can marry him and be his little slave forever. She refuses even to call the Shepherd to come and help her. How to do the impossible? Shepherd comes anyway and asks her to lay on an alter her will, dread and her shrinking. She gets another stone and goes on to climb the precipice, by roping herself to her two companions Sorrow and Suffering. The climb was not that scary as it looked after all.

On the way she learns from a small flower that bravely puts forth her shoot and a single red flower, whose name was ‘Bearing-the-cost,’ or ‘forgiveness.’ The plant has suffered for what others had done to her, leaving her in a desolate place, but she had forgiven them and is blossoming on her own. Much-Afraid collects another stone from there and she tries to practice this lesson. Next she is led through danger and tribulation, a Forest of Danger, instead of the precipice leading to the mountains. She bawls, cries out that the Shepherd is deceiving her. Where are his promises? How much longer she must suffer like this? But the Shepherd assures with her, that even when she walks through the valley of death he will be with her and that no arrow will come anywhere near her. Though encouraged, soon her family arrive and laugh at her for what a fool she is to trust a bully who gives her nothing but difficulties and sufferings. Where are his promises? She too echoes these sentiments in her heart. She starts repeating the verse, “Though a thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousands at thy right hand, it shall not come nigh thee…” and kept progressing. A storm was brewing; fortunately they see a small log hut and lock themselves safely there waiting for a few days for the storm to abate. She kept softly repeating to herself, “He has covered me with his feathers, and under his wings I do trust.”

Still they were walking on level ground. Are they going round and round, in circles as her relatives were taunting her? Doubt clouded her mind. Discouraged she suggested going back and checking up the route. Her companions Sorrow and Suffering refused. With reluctance she walked on and stumbled and fell many times in the muddy soil and bruised herself all over. To overcome her discouragement, she started to sing, “How lovely and how nimble are Thy feet … On all the mountains there is no gazelle, no roe or hind, can overtake thee nor can leap as well …” It brought the delighted Shepherd to her! He washed and cleansed her. He then asks her a tricky question – If the whole world were to say that the Shepherd is deceiving her, will she still trust and follow him? What if he really deceived her? Will she still follow him? Much-Afraid had come to a stage in her spiritual life that she was willing even for this. She told him that he may deceive her, but still she will follow him only, because she loves him so much and that she cannot live without him.

Now the path again went straight down to the valley and not up in the mountain. She was desperate. She could turn back and stop following the Shepherd. It is her choice. But she couldn’t imagine her life without the Shepherd. What will she do? She realized she had no life without him. So she comes to the low point to tell the Shepherd, “You may deceive me, but only don’t let me leave you or turn back,” entreating like Ruth. As she walked in the Valley of Loss, she made up her mind to lose everything but not her Shepherd. But in her heart she shivers, “He will never be content until he makes me what he is determined that I ought to be,” and wonders “what he plans to do next, and will it hurt very much?”

Fortunately Shepherd comes and takes them in hanging chairs, like sky-chairs, to a very steep mountain, and they reach the very borders of the Land of Love, as he had promised. Now for the last time he asks her to sacrifice something, the very nature of her, the human love, that longing to be loved, to be placed on the altar as a burnt offering. She finds that she cannot do it by herself though she is willing. Shepherd helps her to root it out by thrusting his hands into her heart. It came out root and branches and all, for it was almost ready to be purged in any case. To her astonishment it did not pain at all! He said, “It is finished.” Now the seedling that Shepherd had planted can thrive and give blossoms.

Much-Afraid gets a new name, “Grace and Glory.” Her companions, Sorrow and Suffering became “Joy and Peace.” Her crippled feet were healed and she got the Hinds’ feet. They stayed there in the mountains for a few weeks enjoying unbroken communion with the Shepherd. But anticlimax comes - as she looked at the valley deep below, her heart ached that they should die without knowing her Shepherd. And they decide, encouraged by the Shepherd to go back to the Valley of Humiliation and be the mouth and hands of the Shepherd to being them also into his fold. She had become like the water fall, which sourced in the mountains, but descended happily to the valley, lower and lower, giving herself in abundant bliss to the others. Her own life would be like that, a self-giving love. She also realized that the Shepherd had brought her to the mountain only for this, so that she can pour out herself in self sacrifice for the others.

I have exceeded the self-imposed limit of four pages for my blogs, but this wonderful story had to be told in greater detail. I didn’t feel like omitting anything from the account. What a rich narrative! God in his mercy bring each one of us to the mountain tops, so that we can go low and yield ourselves completely to Him, so that his agape love grows in our hearts and it becomes easy to serve him and serve others. Amen.

God bless you all.