First Night in the Woods:
Well, we dropped off the older three kids at camp and after 13 hours of driving north with our tent, one pair of clothes for the river a cooler of food, we arrived at our first camp ground before heading out on the river the following day. If you asked me where this place was, I would not be able to tell you. This was one of those situations when the iPhone GPS lost it's signal an hour ago and you are navigating through the back woods of Wisconsin praying you will see another living being. Even I was willing to stop and ask for directions at this point. The sun was setting and my eyes were peeled for any sign of a grass patch where I could set up my makeshift tent to rest for the night. Just then the "check engine immediately" light came on in my nearly ten year old pick up truck. "Great" I thought, "why did I fight the urge to buy that new Denali I have been looking at to fit the wrong size monster tires purchased on eBay last month?" Now I am in the middle of no where and there is nothing I am going to be able to do but wait for the next elk to walk by and try to jump on the back of that thing. This was my first thought of "what happens if this doesn't all work out the way you had hoped". How was I going to teach my sons to be a man if I couldn't even get to where we needed to be? Maybe The Lord had something different in mind for us. Little did I know what was about to come later in the week.
Thankfully, mounting an elk was not in the forecast for us. I turned the corner and came into the bustling town of "day lake" with a population of 24. That was a larger number than the teeth that were in the man's mouth at the local gas station which doubled as the bar, post office and town hang out. I laughed as I thought about moving my family here. We could nearly double there size with one family not to mention offer another possible means to marry off there children to someone not related. The gentleman (loose definition) directed informed me that there was a camp ground just a mile up the road. The check engine light would have to wait. I was not about to ask if there was a shop in the vicinity of lets say 250 mile radious. he would have just laughed and revealed those pearly whites (or should I say "white") again.
I should have known there would be a problem when we arrived at the camp site and there was not a soul around. I opened the door to my truck and was immediately introduced to Wisconsin's state bird, the Mosquito! It was as if old Harry yelled to his mosquito friends, "Quick, come over here, we have a live one!" Now I knew why the guys at camp laughed at me when dropping the kids off when they heard my plans to camp out. His parting words as I walked out the door were "make sure you have some bug spray". The opportune word was "some" I thought. At this point, I was convinced I would need at least ten bottles of that 100% deet stuff. I surveyed the camp site through the swarm of mosquitoes and chuckled at the last time I was in a situation like this. In college, I went to the Boundary Waters with some guys and suited up in our nets from head to toe to keep those blood-sucking vermin off of you. There is nothing like a "man trip" to the woods in only a mosquito net (and I mean only). Our plan was to take our hatchets and knives to man-handle a bear in the evening when it came for our food. We all camped in surrounding trees in wait. Thank God, the bears never came, or I would not likely be writing this now. Well, this time I had my two small sons with me and having a bear visit in the evening was no longer in my "top 10 list".
As I unpacked our supplies and set up camp I realized that I had forgotten the meat in the fridge back home. "Great", I thought, as Iooked at six bags of beef jerky and eight bottles of Starbucks coffee. Well, part of being a man was improvising, right?
Given that I clearly do not know what it really means to be a man, I decided that we should open the Bible and read from one of my heroes; King David. I often think about David as a valiant warrior who was afraid of nothing. I know that God references him as a man after His own heart, but I was unaware of what that really meant. We began reading that first night. We picked up the story in 1 Samuel 16 when David was anointed to be the next king. Samuel, a rather worthy individual given his many year of being a prophet of The Lord, was asked to select the next king from the home of Jesse. God did not specify which of Jesse's sons was to be pronounced the king, so the oldest seven were paraded in front of him. These young men must have been clearly capable based on the fact that Samuel said "Certainly the Lord's anointed one is here before him." God responded "Man does not see what The Lord sees, for man sees what is visible, but The Lord sees the heart." This was the first teaching moment from the text. Being a man meant that it is easy to focus on the things that we see. Our natural bent is to look at the wrong things as men. How easy it is to assume that smartest person will excel in school, the most talented team will win the game, or the hardest worker will be the most successful. God was teaching Samuel that the heart was what He was interested in and David, the youngest and most unlikely of candidates was to be His new king. So "being a man" starts with an accurate understanding of our position. We are broken individuals that are in desperate need of seeing things the way God does. Finally, it was very evident that David did nothing to accept this calling by The Lord. This was 100% God calling David because it says after he was anointed by Samuel, "the Spirit of The Lord took control of David from that day forward." At this point God was starting to stir my thoughts and expose so many misconceptions I had about what "being a man" was all about...and this was only the first night!
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