While hiking in the beautiful Teton National Park just outside of Jackson Hole Wyoming with my Dad, and my Friend Jason, I had an interesting experience. Coming down a mountain, Jason starts to whine about this noise he is hearing... It sounds high pitched... I figure it is a bobcat. So I tell him to stop whining and be a man. My Dad is a bit hard of hearing, so he misses half of the conversation, but catches enough to know we are talking about wild animals. He starts clapping and encourages us to also make noise.So we round a bend and to my right is a little brown bear cub about 10 feet from the trail. It is sorta cute... almost. I causally try to get the other guys attention, when I notice that cute cubbie is not alone. Momma Grizzle is about 10 feet past her munching on an unlucky elk. -- Did you know that grizzle bears are faster than humans up and down hill, climbing trees, and in the water? Did you know that their claws are stronger than iron, and that they usually decapitate human's in one swing? Did you know that they can get nearly 8 ft tall and nearly 1400 lbs? Well they can.--
So while the bear Mom stood and stared us down... Jason bolted down the hill (I guess he figured, that he didn't have to outrun the bear... just one of the rest of us...), my dad started clapping again, repeating, "Make noise! Make Noise!", and I started considering what I would do without any weapons if the bear started to eat Jason or my Dad. --I started shaking too... -- Thankfully the bear had already picked up "take-out" elk for the night, so we were spared a ride through her digestive highway.
A little later we stopped at a ranger station, and mentioned that we had seen a grizzly bear. The ranger assured us that we were mistaken. Only black bears were in the park. He proceeded to show us a picture of a black bear in a book. I was unconvinced, and flipped ahead a few pages to another bear, and asked him what it was. "A grizzly," he replied, " but that is not what you saw... this is what you say." And he flipped to another black bear. This repeated through the rest of the book, until finally we left. But, try as he did, every single picture confirmed what the three of us knew all along. Just because an expert gives me a bunch of reasons why I can not possible have seen a grizzly... I know what I saw. It is burned in my mind, as clear as on that day, half a decade later.
There are many experts who say that Christ could not possibly have been God... and yet, for 2000 years, people have stuck to what they saw.
As John puts it in the Bible, (1 John 1:1) "We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life."
(Image from my friend Paul's amazing pictures! Check them out:
Or his blog: http://throughphotography.blogspot.com/ )
