Not What I Expected

God is really unpredictable. Oh, I know that there are all sorts of prophecies in the Bible about what He plans to do, but those things are big picture kinds of things. Those are things like conquering evil and preparing a place in heaven for those that love Him. Of course these are things that I count on, and I am convinced that God will honor all of His commitments. The problem is that I don’t think He ever does anything the way people think that He should. This is what I mean when I say that God is unpredictable. He has his own way of doing things that I would never predict.

But I don’t want to talk about how God is unpredictable in a big sense. That is important for sure, but I am at a point where I am most fascinated with how He is unpredictable to me. It really makes me be in awe of Him. You see, at some level I like to think that I am unpredictable and it just fascinates me how God is so good at it. I think that I like being unpredictable because it keeps me, “In the know” if you know what I mean. I guess it is kind of a situation where if you don’t know what is about to happen, and I do then I have something to grin about. I try not to grin in those situations. You might be able to predict what is going to happen.

I suppose that this little quirk of mine (wanting to be unpredictable) is one reason why I like Christmas. I like knowing what I have bought for people, and having other people guess what I have bought them. It frustrates me when they don’t try to find out what I have bought them. Usually I get so frustrated when they don’t ask that I go ahead and tell them what it is just to show them who is really on top of this game… It makes perfect sense to me.

Well, anyway you can tell that I am pretty horrible at the keeping secrets game at Christmas. There was this one time though, when I got it right, and It did have unexpected results.

It began with a fight. My wife came home and began talking to me about this new sewing machine that she had seen. I told her I was only interested in the green feature and when I found out how much it was I said “No Way.” I don’t remember many details about the fight but I am sure I felt stupid. To be fair, you do need to know that my wife is incredible with a sewing machine. She has sewn many wedding dresses that even a person like me with few redeeming cultural qualities appreciates. When she talks to me about this stuff I feel like I have the social graces of a caveman. All of that is just to point out that it is not that ridiculous that she would want an expensive sewing machine.

This all happened early in the fall quite a long time before Thanksgiving. As Christmas got closer I began to think about how I could get my wife a really nice gift. Of course all those little moments were interrupted by visions of Betsy Ross sewing the Stars and Stripes with a Viking 6000 sewing machine. Every time I had that vision Betsy Ross would look up at me and tell me that she was glad her husband loved her enough to give her a good sewing machine. She would even say how much George Washington thought her work improved with the new machine.

Well, that settled it. I was bound and determined to make sure that my wife would have the same opportunity to serve her country that Betsy Ross had. I also decided that this was the one chance I would have to surprise my wife at Christmas. I began to develop a plan to make sure she was fooled.

As Christmas approached I wrapped some old stained dishtowels up in a package and placed them under the tree with a card that said from Trent to Sherry. I then told my four-year-old son not to tell mom that we bought her a red blouse and a blue blouse. Of course he promptly told her that we bought her 2 blouses; one red one and one blue one. Sherry was underwhelmed but smiled anyway.

Sherry’s mother played Santa and delivered the machine in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, placing it way back in the corner where it could not be seen. When morning came we all got up to open presents. Sherry was last and looked utterly confused when she opened up her dishtowels. I asked her if she liked them and she weakly said “sure.” I told her that I realized it was a crappy gift and then I got the box with the machine in it and handed it to her. I said why you don’t use this to make some new ones. She began to cry. I never thought that a sewing machine could make someone cry but this one did. When she began to cry I began to cry. I was moved to see her so happy with my gift. She later said that it was not the sewing machine that made her cry, instead it was the fact that I had sacrificed to get her what she wanted. My unpredictable behavior had unpredictable results even for me.

I guess I should not be surprised when God steps in and uses the same unpredictable methods to bless His children. In spite of this, it seems that every time that He does it I am still shocked not just at what he does but how He does it. I found this out a while back when I took my family camping in Colorado.

My son had been insisting on camping in Colorado for quite a while so we were pretty excited about getting to go. When we go there we decided to camp at a beautiful campground called Trujillo Meadows. It was at about 10,500 feet so it was pretty cool especially at night. When we arrived it was raining. It was not raining hard, just steady. As the rain fell I imagined that I was a Neanderthal caveman getting camp ready for his cave family. This was hard to do since we camped within 20 feet of the car.

As I set up the tent I started thinking about building a fire. The drizzle that was falling was persistent enough to get every piece of firewood around the entire campground wet, not soaking wet, just too wet for a fire. On the way in to the camp site I had seen that there was nice dry wood at the Camp Host’s trailer, but it was five dollars a bundle. A real Neanderthal does not need store bought wood for his fire.

I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time camping with my family without a campfire. Maybe I really am a cave man, but I usually see it as my duty to make sure the fire is going strong. In fact, there was another time when I was camping that I almost burned off my entire beard while building a campfire. The situation was very similar to this one. All of the wood was wet very difficult to light. I decided to use Coleman fuel as a fire starter. I put a little bit on and tossed in a match. Nothing. I put a little more on and nothing. When my first two attempts with the Coleman fuel failed, I decided to soak the wood with the stuff. Then I positioned myself over the fire so I could be careful to make sure that the match landed in the right place. Heat and light were all I remember after that. Well, that and the strange scent of scorched hair. I gave up the fire after that and prepared our meal on the Coleman stove. When I served the meal I had prepared to my wife the first thing she said was, “Are you going burn the other side of your face to even up your beard and eyebrows?” I was shocked. I asked her if she saw what happened and she said, “Yes, including the flames that went 3 feet above your head.”

With that unpleasant memory firmly in place I was going to make sure that I kept all my facial hair right where God grew it on my face, but I was still determined to build a fire. For an hour Sherry, Sawyer (my son) and I were busy finding kindling, blowing on the few embers we had to keep them going, and piling the kindling carefully on the fire. We were being successful. By successful I just mean that we had very weak flame. Sherry and Sawyer gave up and went to the tent. I thought that they were being very poor cave people by retiring to the tent without a fire.
I was not going to give up. I continued looking for kindling and placing it carefully on the fire. I started picking pinesap from the trees around me around the campsite and placing it on the fire. I would blow gently into the embers to get a flame going and then I would accidentally inhale and start coughing. When I finished coughing I thought that it was getting cold because my breath was making a fog. This happened several times before I realized that the fog was actually the campfire smoke that I had been inhaling just before I blew onto the fire.

Finally, a breakthrough happened. The clouds broke and the sun came shining down on my little campfire. The misty rain quit falling and my fire sprang up from the drying wood. I felt like I was Grizzly Adams. Sherry called from tent, “Trent, are you still trying to get that fire going?”

“No, it is going quite nicely thank you. The mission is accomplished. Come on out and enjoy the fire.” Her reply was a simple, “No, I think I’ll stay in the tent for a while.”

Now I have to be honest with you. I had been working on this fire for hours in a monsoon, filling my lungs with carcinogenic campfire smoke, scavenging the entire forest for small pieces of kindling, all for the simple purpose of building a fire to protect my family from the dangers of hypothermia. Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but the cave man inside me was offended. After all that what did I get for my efforts? I got nothing but a simple, “No, Thank you.”

I don’t know why, but I felt abandoned and unappreciated. I looked behind the tent and I saw a small trail leading into the forest. “Sherry,” I said as I passed the tent, “I am going to take a walk.” Without waiting for a reply I took off.

As I walked I thought about my unappreciated fire and was glad to be walking alone in a beautiful evergreen forest in the mountains of Colorado. To be honest with you, I don’t think there is a better place to pout in the entire world.

It did not take long for the magnificence of the forest to intoxicate me. Jays were bouncing from tree limb to tree limb. Some of them chastised me for polluting their pristine home with my presence. As the jays squawked and complained, Chipmunks scavenged the forest floor oblivious to my intrusion. I was overwhelmed.

Soon I scooted off the trail to the west so I could see the setting sun shine through the pine needles of those magnificent trees. The smell of the rain and the pine mixed into my kind of aromatherapy. Several trees had fallen in this area leaving their tattered root balls clinging to the side of the mountain. I picked out one of them and had a seat.

I was in awe of the beauty around me, but I was still pouting. Really, can you blame me? Okay, maybe you can, but at the time I thought I was horribly mistreated, but I don’t think I could have told you how. I sat on my log and prayed. I laid out my complaints and asked God to bless me with a sign that He was still there listening to me, caring for me, watching out for me.

I’ve asked this prayer a couple of times in the past and I have always been blessed with things that are hard to explain. One time I was driving to work on a Saturday and I really was tired. I needed a boost. After asking God for a sign that He was still listening to me and caring for me the leaves were brighter than they had ever been. Mist was rising from the ponds that I drove by. Four deer bounded across the road in front of me and a coyote loped across a pasture on my right. Seeing the work of God’s hands was uplifting. I don’t know if God changed my surroundings or if he changed me on that morning, but I do know that He did something. It was profound, and I was aware of Him as well as aware of all that was His.

I suppose that my request in that grove of pines was not that much different than that early Saturday morning, but why I had to ask for something special when I was already sitting in the middle of an ancient forest that smelled of God’s creative power I do not know. Maybe it was selfish and maybe it was my pouting and maybe it was my genuine desire to see God reveal himself to me in an intensely personal way. God did not disappoint me but I would have never predicted what he did.

Thirty yards down the hill from where I was sitting I saw the brush begin to move. I looked closely expecting to see an elk or a mule deer come into view. I was getting my thank you speech ready for God when two large fluffy ears poked out of the brush followed by the rest of a large cinnamon colored bear body. I was speechless, and I forgot my thank you speech. I was breathless.

Two years prior to this camping trip my family was camping in New Mexico. It was also bear country and warning signs were everywhere. My son, who was six at the time, asked what all the signs were about. I told him that we were very lucky to be in bear country. He did not share the same happy thought that I did. He was concerned and did not respond favorably to my encouraging voice. “Sawyer,” I said, “I doubt we see a bear but if we are lucky enough to see one of these huge ferocious animals, there will not be anything to fear. It will be as scared of us and we are of it.”

Now that I was facing my own bear less than 30 yards away, I was realized that this must be one terrified bear. The bear may not have seen me or smelled me because the wind was blowing gently from the bear to me and I have heard that bears do not see well. Regardless of how sensory deprived the bear may have been, he soon began moving his big, brown, predator body my direction.

Immediately, I stood up tall just like all the signs in the commodes said to do. You really couldn’t miss these signs. They were placed at eye level just across from the toilet seat in all of the campground restrooms. The most important point they all made was do not run. I wasn’t running, but it was amazing how I could lose my breath without any exercise. I backed my way up the hill to the trail, and when I was out of sight of the bear I began scampering back to the campsite.

Suddenly, I realized that my family was less than 150 yards from a large, hungry, malicious predator. I was concerned. What if this was a killer bear that was rummaging through all the campgrounds in the Rockies going through tents and eating the campers like they were bon bons? Pretty silly, huh? I think so now, but I did not at the time. I got back to the tent and quietly but firmly told Sherry to get out of the tent.

She wanted to know why and I told her in a soft voice, “I just saw a bear, a big bear, a really big bear.”

Her response came quickly and loudly accompanied by the rapid opening of the zippers of the tent, “No way, where? Come on show me, I’ve got to see it.” I was very surprised at her response. She was supposed to be afraid. I was her cave man protector, who had built a fire to warm her bones, and now I was warning her of the impending danger of a predator close to the camp, and all she wanted to do was go see it.

She talked me into showing her where I had seen it, but not until we put Sawyer in the car. We told him we would be right back, but all he wanted to know was if he could watch the DVD player while he was in the car. So, Sherry and I were off to investigate the killer bear that was threatening my family. We talked loudly the entire time we were walking to let the bear know ahead of time that we were there; actually I was the one talking loudly. Sherry was talking softly hoping that she would get to see it. It may sound silly but talking loudly is what you are supposed to do. Remember bears are supposed to be more afraid of you than you are of them.
Soon, Sherry and I came to the spot where I ventured off the trail to find a spot to watch the sun set. We walked quietly for a few minutes until we came to the fallen tree I had been sitting on. I pointed down the hill to where the bear began browsing his way toward me and had a seat. When I sat down I remembered what I had prayed.