Late one afternoon in the autumn of 1978, Seattle based climber Jim Wickwire and his partner reached the summit of K-2, the second highest peak in the world.  Although they were elated, they realized that they did not have enough time to return to their camp by nightfall.  So they bivouacked, digging in below the summit, without a tent or sleeping bag, until the morning.
     Wickwire's diary, written at various points during the bitterly cold night, poignantly tells of his struggles to stay awake (if he had fallen asleep, he probably would have frozen to death), his thoughts about his comrades at the lower camps, and how deeply he longed for his wife Mary Lou.
     As he saw the sun rise after what had seemed an interminable darkness, Wickwire knew that he had made it.  He had survived the worse the mountains could throw at him.  Though he was tired and unspeakably hungry and thirsty, Wickwire could now believe that he would live.  Life had never looked sweeter, never looked more precious than it did on that morning on the frigid slopes of K-2.  "I'm coming home, Mary Lou," he wrote in his diary, "I love you."
     In the grand newness of the sunrise over the snowy folds of the Baltoro Himalayas, Wickwire saw his salvation.  Did he expect to?  Only he knows.  But at this point he knew that he would make his way home safely.  Although that sunrise was for the rest of the world just one more rotation of the earth, a flash of renewal embedded in a rhythm that had been present since the world began, for Wickwire it was a consuming picture of meaning and hope.  He had looked in the darkest darkness, and found a renewing newness, the “rebirth” that set him free.
     Even if they are not as intense as Wickwire's, we all experience such moments, we all experience points of grace, times of newness, passages of transition, entrances of rebirth.  Such moments stir our hearts, infuse our minds, rock our soul; they shape us, they change us; they show us the possibilities of existence, the existential potential of a living God.  They show us what life is meant to be.
     All these moments pale, however, before the ultimate moment, the ultimate "rebirth" of all:  the definitive redemptive experience of knowing God, the God of infinite potentiality, of knowing God as savior, creator, and friend.  As the apostle Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, that person becomes a new creation . . . all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
     Rebirth in Jesus is the rebirth that never ends.