“You can’t out run a bear. Better to play dead and take your chances the bear will lose interest in you.” That’s what the Park Ranger said to me and my two friends just before we started our climb up the mountain and into the trees in front of us.
It was the mid 70’s. Dan and Jim and I were travelling out west before we had to return to New Jersey to begin another year of teaching. The trip that summer to Yellowstone National Park is a story all in itself. Perhaps I will share that story in another post. For this story, all you need to know is where we were planning to hike that day was a place where there had been two grizzly bear maulings earlier in the week.
It was my turn to cook and clean up that night. While I was tending to my duties, Dan and Jim took off to the meadow about a mile away to watch the sunset. Just at dusk, wildlife start to gather at the stream that flows through the wide open meadow. Deer, buffalo, bear all come together to drink from the stream. After drinking the water and grazing on the abundant vegetation, the animals slowly disappear to their secret places for the night.
The sun went down and I huddled closer to the fire I had kept burning. Now that the sun had gone down, it was getting colder. I started to worry about Dan and Jim. Why weren’t they back, where they OK?
The trail connecting our camp site and the meadow was difficult to manage even in the bright light of day. I noticed that the two flashlights we brought with us were sitting next to our supplies. Dan and Jim were without light.
I don’t believe I had ever felt more relaxed than I did sitting by the fire. I was a bit anxious about Dan and Jim’s whereabouts, but overall, I was at peace. It had been a long time since I had felt that way.
Just then, I heard a tremendous growling sound over my shoulder. There was a loud crashing sound of underbrush and trees limbs being broken. The growling got louder – whatever was coming towards me from the woods was getting closer very quickly.
“You can’t outrun a bear. Better to play dead and take your chances.” The ranger’s words came slamming back. The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. The flight response kicked in. I was just about to go running off into the woods – “you can’t outrun a bear.” I sat down on the ground, took a deep breath and prepared to die.
I gave up.
In the dark, by oneself, your mind can create its own subjective reality. The mind, over-stimulated with impulses, real and imagined takes over. What I was thinking and experiencing was terrifyingly real to me. In an instant of panic, I had talked myself into believing with every muscle in my body and every brain cell wildly firing that I was being attacked by a bear. I was going to die. I sat down waiting for the end, waiting for death.
Dan and Jim came out of the woods laughing. They had scared the ?+@% out of me. To them, seeing me scared to death was a joke that hit its mark. To me it was something different.
What was a joke to Dan and Jim was a terrifying moment in my life. To be honest, that joke changed my life. Given some time and distance from the event, I began to see I had experienced something significant. Real or not, I had felt death’s touch. I had surrendered to fate. In those few seconds of sheer panic I had prepared myself to die alone in the woods.
Since then, I have never again been scared of death or of dying.
Since then I have found comfort in my faith. I have found something to believe in that has convinced me when this earthly life is over, an eternal life begins. Who knows for sure how this belief all works out, but my faith in an afterlife is a source of comfort. It brings me peace. Because of my faith, I am not anxious about death.
I don’t want to die, I don’t want a painful or violent death, but I am not afraid of death. I was freed of that fear many years ago. My faith offers me the possibility of endless joy and peace now, and in some form, in a future yet to be fully realized .
Just a final thought – I am at that age when the time for death is no longer a subject for idle conversation. Death is an integral part of each day of my life. As a pastor, I spend much of my time with those who are dying. I try to comfort them. I attempt to offer comfort to those folks who are left behind.
I am at that age when I realize it could just as easily be me in that hospital bed, facing death, as those to whom I pastor through the changes from earthly life to death It could just as easily be me in that casket as the one staring back at me.
My life of hope was born the moment I sat down by that campfire and surrendered to death so many years ago. Since that time, since that joke was played on me, I have lived in hope. Twenty years ago I learned that living in hope wasn’t enough. I was called on to harness the power and promise of the hope I believed in, in order to accomplish something good, something noble. Hope led me to believing that every life should have a noble purpose.
Live with hope, die with hope, be born again into eternal hope. While you live fully in the present, spend your life accomplishing a noble purpose. It makes all the jokes we play on one another seem insignificant by comparison.
I have to admit this is the first time I’ve ever heard about a practical joke serving a valuable purpose. I’m glad you thought your way through it. (And congratulations on the tremendous uptick in Subscribers!)
When you get lemons…I am not normally a fan of practical jokes although that was the habit of my family as I was growing up. That’s where I learned to find meaning in the sometimes disastrous outcomes resulting from an innocent joke. BTW, how did you know about the number of my subscribers?