The Theosophical Society’s electronic sign on Geneva Road is promoting a New Year Forest Bathing Walk today. Where? On their well-manicured grounds? At a forest preserve? Does the bathing involve a water source? What if the pond or river is frozen? Would the walk then evolve into a polar bear plunge?

With more questions than answers, I decided some electronic research was in order. Forest bathing has its roots in Japan and Asia, where nature therapy has long been practiced in stress reduction. One site assured me that no actual bathing was required—it was more an absorption of the forest atmosphere. Or “living fully in the moment while bathing your senses in nature.”

Just as I was getting comfortable with the idea, another site warned of potential dangers in forest bathing walks insects, wild animals and uneven ground. Bring a buddy or let someone know where you’re going and how long you’ll be gone. I wasn’t sure I could fully bathe my senses in nature if I were constantly looking over my shoulder for potential dangers.

Then there's the site that offers a beginner's guide to forest bathing, and boldly declares that "the forest holds answers to questions we have yet to ask."

There are snags, however, in forest bathing walks. A certified guide announces the walk is at an end; the forest gives way to a clearing, the dangers still lurk, and the stress returns until my next scheduled forest bathing walk.

And what about all those questions we actually are asking? What about CAT scans and unemployment and sick children or assisted living. Questions about fractured relationships and guilt over past and present sins. No forest has the answers to these questions and the burdens they create.

The sticking point with these walks isn’t the forest or nature. In the psalms, forests sing for joy, fields exult, hills gird themselves with joy, and the heavens talk day and night about God’s glory and his power. The sticking point is that we want to control the answers to questions and the cleansing process from stress, and ultimately from sin. We want to look to ourselves or the natural world instead of lifting our eyes to the One who made the forests.

Remember Naaman and his wife and their little servant girl, who knew the prophet Elisha. Second Kings 5:1 describes Naaman as “a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.” And oh, did he want to be cured, and oh, did he not like Elisha’s remedy: “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh will be restored, and you shall be clean.” Naaman not only was angry about the way he was to be cured, but also about the where—the River of Jordan. There he stood outside of Elisha’s door with his horses and chariots, and the prophet didn’t even come out to pay his respects, or to cure him the way he deserved. It was the servants who urged Naaman to wash and be clean, and he finally did and “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” (2 Kings 5:14)

As followers of Christ, we might be more like Naaman than we care to admit. We’re successful and important people for whom Jesus died. Without much effort, we absorb self-righteousness, and rely on ourselves for both cure and comfort from sin and stress. We forget for a moment that the cure is the same one Elisha gave Naaman, “Go and wash.”

Like King David did when the prophet Nathan confronted him with his sin with Bathsheba.

“Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51:2, 7)

We cannot find true, life-changing cleansing in a forest. We cannot perform the cleansing ritual ourselves. No bath will do it. It cannot come from within; it cannot come from the wonders of nature.

The cure is pretty clear and direct: don’t say we do not sin, confess our sins, wash in the blood of Jesus who cleanses us from all sin. We don't deserve this. We will never earn it. There is only one tree on which we can depend--the one on which our Savior hung and died in our place. This is the sacrifice that forevermore forgives, the one-tree forest in which we can freely walk and find new life and the strength to live this day.