For the past five years around summer’s end, I have had a special visitor at my home. What’s made these visits particularly interesting is that I have never met this visitor face to face. That’s a good thing, because the visitor is a black bear. I know it’s been a bear because of the evidence it has left behind: things like destroyed bird feeders, blackberry colored scat, clawed-up apple trees, and honey combs devoid of honey next to a hole where a bee colony once existed. So I have come to expect sometime in the late summer each year, I’ll find a bear calling card somewhere on the property.
This year was no exception. My black bear friend (and I use that term loosely) paid a visit. This year’s clue was a tipped-over burn barrel. I was sure that it had mistaken the fifty-five gallon drum I had burned brush in for a garbage can. The moderate drought we experienced here had caused the bears to forage further from their usual territory to fatten up for the coming winter. Local newspaper articles chronicled some of the bear adventures into town, with bird feeders and garbage cans being the victims of choice. When I saw the barrel lying on its side with ashes on the ground, I immediately recognized it as bear sign. I went to right the barrel and clean up the mess, and that’s when the action started. It became apparent as soon as I started to lift the barrel that the bear wasn’t really interested in the contents of the barrel, but the prize which lay below it. As soon as I lifted the drum off the ground, my ears picked up a faint hum, which quickly intensified into what can only be described as a thousand tiny yellow and black chainsaws buzzing at full throttle. It was a swarm of very upset bees. That bear knew better, and at that moment I wished I had too!
My exit from that spot was less than regal. It was along the lines of Riverdance, the Chicken Dance, a Benny Hill chase scene, and Ernest goes to Chippewa Falls. Running away at full speed, I took my shirt off and flailed away at those angry defenders of the hive. As silly as it looked, my “strategy” resulted with my only getting stung once. It could have been worse - much worse.
I find it interesting and laughable that at times I believe I have a situation assessed properly, only to find out the hard way that I didn’t. Life, as usual, holds many surprises. In hindsight, I think I could have figured that the bear wasn’t really after ashes, and I should have known that it’s extraordinary sense of smell gave away the fact that no tasty morsels of any kind were present inside of it. I should have known that it was sensing something else, but I didn’t. I’m giving myself a break though, because life isn’t really lived in hindsight. I’ll learn from it, but there really wasn’t any way for me to have known that I was walking into a bad scene. Had I known, I would have done it differently.
The larger lesson in all of this is that if I find myself in a situation that is inconsistent with the life God calls me to, it is more important that I get out of there than how I look in the process. If I look silly or foolish in the eyes of men as I exit a situation that my Father wants me to leave, then so be it. God doesn’t want me to leave because He’s a killjoy; it’s because He doesn’t want me to get dirty, hurt, or stung.
I know I don’t have the foreknowledge of God, but I do have His Holy Spirit to sound the alarm when it’s time to avoid or time to get out. So when I hear the Spirit buzzing, I’m running. I hope you do too.
Grace to you.
Dave Paukner
