Fierce Beauty (11 page)

Everything seemed to happen fast and slow at the same time. I grabbed my camera, turned it on, and waited to activate the telephoto lens. The mother bear was about thirty yards up the hillside when I framed her up.

Through the lens of my camera, as if I were viewing a
National Geographic
moment, I watched the scene. Without warning, the mother bear planted her left hind foot. In a single motion her body whirled around like a great, dark cape.

She didn’t miss a beat. Instead of watching her hind legs launch up the hill, I was now seeing her front legs charge down the hill. In a series of great leaps, she stormed directly toward us. My
National Geographic
picture suddenly turned into a horror scene.

Inside the truck I dropped my camera. The elation the girls and I had felt milliseconds earlier instantly transformed into terror.

In one last vault the mother bear landed squarely on the top of the embankment only four yards from our truck! She was slightly higher than my driver’s side window and could easily jump across. We were now eye to eye!

What I saw next is permanently seared into my memory. As the mother bear’s front paws hit the top of the embankment, her momentum forced her weight toward us. In an effort to keep from tumbling over the bank and into the truck, she drove all her claws forward and down, exposing their full length. In the same instant, her ears pressed backward, flat against her head, as all the hair down her back stood straight up. In one final display of fury, she pulled her lips back as far as possible and let out a fearsome, teeth-clenched, growl! The sound was loud enough for me to hear above the rumble of my truck’s engine.

In a fraction of a second, this bear showed me
every
weapon she had. In all my life I’d never seen an image of greater ferocity. Her message was
obvious: “These are
my
cubs, and this is
my
territory, and if you don’t leave now … I
will
kill you!” She was so close that I could clearly see—and in my mind I
still
do—how perfectly her bared teeth fit together.

In what seemed like slow motion, I watched the bear bring her hind legs forward and begin to coil her body like a spring. Clearly, the mother grizzly’s next intention was to jump the short distance into my open truck window!

That was the exact moment when the electrical connection between my brain and right foot finally fired. It was the closest I’ve ever come to discovering if my Dodge Dually could pop a wheelie!

With cheese and body parts flying, we careened down the road a quarter mile before pulling off to gather ourselves. Since we’d all been watching the charging grizzly on our left, I hadn’t realized Laurie had leaned out the open passenger window and was looking over the top of the cab to get a better picture. Although she had a firm grasp on the safety handle, when I gunned the truck, she almost did the splits to maintain her balance.

Kelsie, meanwhile, had imitated a cartoon Tasmanian devil and nearly spun a hole in the seat next to me. When she finally stopped turning, she was upside down and face up with her head under the dashboard. At one point during our flight, either her knee or foot smashed against my throat—I’m still not sure which. Adding to our disarray were fragments of cheese and crackers everywhere.

After righting both Kelsie and Laurie, picking strands of cheese out of my hair, and doing a quick head count (surprisingly, I could still count to five), everyone burst out in an uncontrollable rush of adrenalized laughter. Had our words been racehorses, they would have been heading down the homestretch. With everyone jabbering at once, it was my extrapolation that Kelsie had spun around in the seat about eight times before going headfirst under the dash. None of us was completely sure why, but we thought she was trying to hit the gas pedal with her hands!

Our conclusion was that
no one
gets to see what we had just seen … and live.

While we continued to mop up inside the cab, a small blue truck pulled to a stop next to us. The driver rolled down his window and blithely drawled, “You guys seen anything?” Clearly, he was not prepared for the onslaught of nearly hysterical words that poured from our truck into his. As our story unfolded, he glanced knowingly at another man seated in the truck with him. Once we finished, he stared at me for a long moment. Finally he said, “Well, I’d say you got lucky. A ranger told me earlier today that more’n likely this same bear, a sow with three cubs, full-on attacked a car this morning.”

Again I envisioned the perfectly fit teeth, grimacing only a few yards from my face. We were more than lucky—much more. The Lord had allowed us to experience something amazing, something incredible, something threatening … for a reason. We would
never
forget it.

The day after our encounter with the mama grizzly at Yellowstone, the girls and I had a twelve-hour drive home to discuss what had happened. We took the time to fully enjoy the fact that God has an uproarious sense of humor. We tried to imagine God saying something like, “Hey, girls! If you think watching a grizzly bear run up a hill is cool, wait till you see
this
!”

Finally, when our laughter quieted into a more serious dialogue, I asked, “Why do you think the Lord allowed us to be charged by a bear? What do you think He wants us to learn from seeing something so remarkable?”

In moments such as these, I might be the leader of events and discussions, but I’m also the student. I’m convinced that I’m far more blessed by the wisdom of these young women than the other way around. Thoughtfully they began to explore my questions. As always, I was amazed by the varied truths each shared. All offered their views except one. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Jenna, my shy girl, staring out the window. The cab fell silent.

Jenna blinked her beautiful blue eyes a few times. I smiled, realizing that horses do exactly the same thing when they’re thinking. In what I’ve come to love as her trademark quiet voice, she said, “Even though I wasn’t in the truck with you guys when this happened, I know what this represents to me. I want to be just like that grizzly. I want to be just as ferocious as a charging bear toward
anything
that comes between me and God. I don’t want to tolerate
any
sin, even the little ones that seem harmless. I want to drive them all out.”

The rest of us sat in silence and let the powerful weight of her words sink in.

Jenna’s answer triggered a thought.

I’ve often contemplated the actions of the religious leaders back in the apostles’ day. Repeatedly, when these civic leaders were confronted with the truth of Christ, they came up with some excuse to drive great men of faith and the truth they carried as far away as they could. Instead of embracing hope in Christ, they pushed it away. With this in mind, perhaps one of the wisest questions we can ask ourselves is, on this day
am I?

Am I behaving like the religious leaders of old, driving away the truth of Jesus and replacing it with my excuses, my desires, my self-justifications? The honest answer for each of us can be found by simply looking at
what
we’re driving out of our hearts: our sin … or our Savior?

We cannot run toward and away from God at the same time.

It is our actions, words, and thoughts that prove what is true. If these things point toward serving ourselves, how do we make it right? How do we realistically chase sin out of our lives?

Well, light and darkness cannot live in the same place.

The answer, then, is simple: we must first recognize our sin. This is necessary because we will not fight that which we do not acknowledge exists. Once we’ve identified our sin and darkness, we need to drive them out by inviting our Lord to transform and cleanse our minds. He does this by pouring His redeeming light of truth into our lives.

Romans 12:2 states, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God
transform
you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will
know
what God wants you to do, and you will
know
how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is.”

Plainly stated, we force sin out of our lives by driving the truth of God’s Word in. How? The same way we drive anything into our lives—through repetition. We do this by purposefully choosing to follow Jesus’ Word and just as purposely choosing to release our own desires. God’s truth will become part of our lives when we
make
it a part by spending time in His Word every day.

Equally important is setting aside time to pray. Prayer is a vital connection between God and us. It changes everything in our lives. Because it changes our very foundations, it changes our hearts. When our foundations are strong, everything we build on top of them is strong as well. A simple reflection of this truth is how difficult it is to maintain ill feelings toward others when we purpose in our hearts to
consistently
pray for them. They may or may not change … but
we
do.

Remember, light and darkness cannot share the same territory.

On that long drive from Yellowstone, Jenna’s soft voice echoed my thoughts when she asked herself a single question: “Within the territory of my heart, am I choosing to tolerate sin, or am I fiercely defending the heart Jesus Christ gave His life to set free?”

Friend, how would you answer?

THE KING

On a late summer evening, the last fiery slivers of sunlight splayed between the craggy peaks of the Cascade mountains. I was working in my lookout, a small room perched on ten-foot stilts, located on the highest crest of our ranch. From this special refuge I took a few moments to admire the saw-toothed beauty of the mountains and reflect on the dream I’d had a few weeks before—the eagle that refused to leave its gilded prison because it was more concerned with appearance and ease than with true freedom.

I wondered,
Am I somehow like this majestic bird? Am I more focused on my own selfish pursuits and the praise of others than on God’s perfect plan for my life?

I closed my eyes and released my thoughts to drift.

Unbidden, my mind filled with the image of a woman in dim light, a solitary figure on her knees. She appeared to be cast in nearly the same position as the eagle bowing low within its confining crown. The woman’s blond hair fell in a soft curtain around her lowered face. I had trouble making out the details. Something about the woman seemed out of focus.

I looked closer, trying to clarify what I was seeing. As I did, the woman appeared to change subtly. Her hair color was slowly
shifting
. As
the seconds passed, it seemed to alternate between blond and gray, then gray and red, then auburn, brunette, and black. Everything about her seemed to be softly phasing, as if I were watching her through a gently turning kaleidoscope. At different moments she looked like an acquaintance at church, then a previous neighbor, then an old friend in high school.