“I tell God, ‘You pick ‘em up, and I’ll put ‘em down,’” the Rev. Edd Spencer is heard saying (referencing his feet) to a fellow Appalachian Trail hiker in a YouTube video filed under the heading “Piece of Cake.”

Spencer started hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1996, beginning in Georgia, and finished in August in Dalton, Mass. in August.

Along the way, Spencer has enjoyed looking out in some areas along the trail and seeing only “what God has made, not what we have made.”

In the tradition of those who transverse the Appalachian Trail, Spencer chose a trail name: Piece of Cake, after finding the trail through the Georgia mountains to be an easy climb.

“Life is a piece of cake,” has been the theme on and off the trail for the 1972 Lexington Theological Seminary M.Div. graduate, who now co-pastors First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Birmingham with his wife, Mary Pat, whom he met while both were LTS students.

The social interaction with people along the way “is the best part of the trail,” Spencer said. “It’s the best of both worlds–the social interaction and Mother Nature.”

Along the way, although there are shelters intermittently along the trail, Spencer has spent some nights sleeping wherever he could lay his head. The hard part about that, noted a fellow traveler, is quite literally the rocks.
“No rocks, no music. In life sometimes we have rocks, but they can be songs,” Spencer noted.

The trail was full of life lessons for Spencer, who observed that when hiking it was easy to spend much of the time looking down, where “all you see are the mud and the rocks.”

The Spencers have two daughters and four grandchildren. His oldest daughter Holly serves as Associate Minister of the South Elkhorn Christian Church (DoC) in Lexington, Ky. His youngest daughter, Stacy, serves as a preschool teacher at Brookhills Church in Birmingham, Alabama. For more, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHqqFV2pDxM