ometime after 1 a.m., April 4, 2013, Sergeant Terry Hughes heard the ringing of an alarm. His alarm was connected to a military-grade motion detector hidden a mile away in the kitchen of the Pine Tree camp near Rome, Maine. Jamming his pickup into gear he raced for the camp. Parking quietly, he ran for the dining hall and looked carefully in the window. A balding man with the hint of some eyebrows moved stealthily inside peering through decades-old glasses at more items to stuff in a bulging backpack. Then he headed for the door. Stepping outside, the burglar’s eyes filled with the blinding light from Sergeant Hughes’ flashlight. A .357 Magnum revolver was pointed at his head and the words, “Get on the ground!” thundered in his ears.
Not long after the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia, Christopher Thomas Knight quietly stepped off a trail in northern Maine and vanished. No one called the police. No one came looking for him. Friends assumed he’d headed off to New York City or Texas or maybe he’d died.
Chris tried living off the land. But road-killed birds and berries make a meager diet. Soon corn and vegetables began to disappear from gardens along his route. But Chris said, “I wanted more than vegetables. It took a while to overcome my scruples. I was always scared when stealing. Always.”
Home
It took a couple of years, but somewhere in the late 1980s he settled down at a campsite near the 30-mile-long shores of Maine’s North Pond area. Surrounded by nearly 300 camps and many cabins in woods crisscrossed with dirt roads and traversed by hunters, Chris found a spot a few hundred yards from some homes. Other than a couple of words addressed to a hiker in the mid 1990s, Chris didn’t speak to another human being for 27 years.
Buried in a dense forest of maple, elm and hemlock and partially hidden by massive car-sized boulders, Chris fashioned a bedroom-sized home. These weren’t luxurious quarters nestled in among the mice and mosquitoes, but they were expensive — very expensive. Every move he took, each decision he made was calculated to keep him concealed. Why? From the Land’s End jeans on his legs to the Columbia jacket keeping him warm —everything but his glasses belonged to someone else. Every cut of meat he cooked was stolen from a freezer and prepared over flames from pilfered propane. The complicated military histories and Tom Clancy novels that filled the frozen hours of Maine nights were stuffed into stolen backpacks and read by stolen flashlights under stolen tarps. Each theft came with its own hefty price tag of fear and guilt.
Moving mostly at night, Chris hopped from boulder to boulder and watched the ground to avoid snapping dead twigs. There had to be no pattern on the ground, no beaten trail into his woodland hideout—and there wasn’t. No detail could be forgotten, and so Chris meticulously painted his shiny stolen garbage cans a dull green. Even wood clothespins were painted darker colors to stop any reflection of light. One yellow shovel was neatly covered in a black bag.
No Pleasure
The burglaries, more than 40 every year for 27 years amounted to well over 1,000 total. You’d think it would get easier on his conscience, but it never did. Each time he’d watch the property carefully for cars, lights, smoke from the fire, or any sign of people in residence. He’d never touch a place with anyone home. Then, “it was usually 1 or 2 a.m. I’d go in, hit the cabinets, the refrigerator. In and out. My heart rate was soaring. It was not a comfortable act. I took no pleasure in it, none at all, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible.”
Then each time, as the severe and blustery Maine winters closed in, Chris hunkered down. With the first snows covering the ground in early November until large patches of barren ground drove back the snow in early April — Chris stayed hidden. Filling Rubbermaid containers with food and setting mouse traps to stop the mice from stealing his stolen stores, he hunkered down in triple stuffed L. L. Bean sleeping bags. Chris trained his body to wake in the early morning hours when he needed to get up before the seductive sleep of hypothermia locked him in its eternal grip. He never allowed himself the warmth of even a small fire; everything had to be cooked over a two-burner propane stove. Any open flame gives off smoke that drifts upward past the camouflaged tarps and above the thick tangle of hemlock branches, like a little gray flag marking a dirty secret below.
As a young man, Chris said he “was lord of the woods. I ruled the land I walked upon. I was tough and clever.” But age and the sugar and alcohol binges he used to fatten up for winter were wearing him down. Every camp he burglarized was checked for a better pair of glasses. But none had the right prescription for his worsening vision. For 10 years he lived in an increasingly blurry fog. Sores on his arm troubled Chris, who said, “My wounds don’t heal like they used to.” He feared diabetes had come through binging on stolen candy.
Now Chris is in prison, locked in a loud, colorful, crude world where he longs for one thing he’s lost — the stillness. Locked in jail, Chris didn’t let his mother visit. As he put it, “Look at me. I’m in my prison clothes. That’s not how I was raised. I couldn’t face her.”
The Stillness of Peace
Do you, too, long for the stillness of peace? You haven’t committed over 1,000 burglaries for food and camping gear and neither have I. But you may have wounds that haven’t healed — wounds in your conscience, a longing for meaning, guilt that is normally drowned out by the rush found in a loud, colorful and trivial world. There’s a way out that doesn’t involve the barrel of a .357 Magnum. The Bible tells about the Lord Jesus Christ: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:55But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)). His love for you, for me and for Chris was so deep that He was willing to be punished for the sin that we have committed. He was willing to pay the penalty that we deserved to heal the wounds brought on by our own sin.
Chris hid from his mom and every other human being in an attempt to find that stillness. But fear lurked under every dead branch and guilt behind each stolen hamburger patty. All that time the God who made Chris was watching over him in mercy. He let a giant shelf mushroom grow that Chris watched with pleasure. God kept him from freezing during the bitter Maine winter. And God provided the stars that Chris enjoyed sparkling overhead as he drifted on the stillness of the nearby lake.
But God has provided more than starlight — He’s given spiritual light. He gave Chris, and you, His Word the Bible. Have you read it? Chris didn’t. He stole National Geographic, People, Glamour and books galore — but never the Bible. “I can’t claim a belief system,” he says. Maybe Chris hid himself from that spiritual light because he said, “I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it.” If Chris had opened a Bible, he could have read, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us” (Titus 3:55Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; (Titus 3:5)).
Will you repent? Will you receive God’s love as a gift? Will you allow the stillness of His presence to drive out the guilt, fear and sin? He tells you, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)).
Find out more about that care and love in Somebody Cares.