One step at a time: Finding the faith to move forward in darkness

When the mountain trail you thought would take you downhill suddenly ends in a great snarl of thorny bushes, and it's nearly dusk, you know there's trouble ahead.

That's the situation my husband, Jun, and I faced years ago when we decided to summit the mountain at the center of his rural village in Zhejiang province. And I never imagined that, in getting lost there, I would find something far more important.

While we had always wanted to reach the top, which drove us to hike there in the afternoon, we hadn't planned for such a precarious descent. But our experience hiking around the village and its hidden network of unofficial trails should have prepared us for this possibility. How many times had we followed a well-trodden dirt path, only to have it stop in a thicket of weedy grass or a maze of bamboo? In fact, the very trail we used to climb the mountain had also disappeared into the woods, forcing us to improvise a way through a dense cluster of bushes and trees.