Lions and Tigers and Bears - Oh My!

By Dan Carpenter in Thinking About Sunday on 8/13/11

Once upon a time, long long ago, I looked into hunting Lions. Tigers. Bears.

Oh my.

Turns out that to do so - in Laos anyways - is punishable by death. They take their tigers quite seriously. There’s just too many people with a desire to hunt them - in the modern way with rifles and so on - and not enough cats to fill the gap. Supply and demand. Cost benefit equations. Welcome to the 21st century. - haven for lions, tigers, and bears.

It appeared that the days of a man facing a hunter - a predator of means - armed only with his wits and a blade, was over.  Which was disappointing to that younger me - he loved the idea of walking into the pit walking back out a victor or to not at all. I wanted to see if I could find a place in this global culture where there was an outlet - a place with no rules, with no technology, with no safety net. I was looking for a challenge - one that mattered. I called it a tiger but what I was really hunting was me.

Myself as i would be, separated form all of… this. From the TV, the internet, the jobs, the cars, the connectivity and all of the people - from the ideas floating around out there about who and what i am. I wanted, desperately, to step outside of it. To be free form definition. To have a chance to define myself anew. To see myself at a critical moment - knowing, without doubt - where my culture and environment ended and i began.

I wanted to find who i was, who I could have been and would have been, in the times of long, long, ago. I wanted to find myself as I’d be without any of the filters, influences, and complexities our culture imprints on us. I was looking for my soul.

In retrospect, I’d come as far as one could go - so far as I could go - without surrender. Without facing the deeper truths - the deeper truths about motivation, fear, and dreams.

And so lions, and tigers, and bears - oh my.

My hunt - constrained to the here and now; our world of moving parts and complex machinery - continued until one day, I found my lion. And it was myself. It was my ego. My fears. The many stories I told about myself - to myself - which didn’t fit the bill. It turned out that the lion, the tiger, the bear - they were here, in me, all the time.

And so one day i walked into the pit. I didn’t run. I didn’t hide. I didn’t let myself sit in illusion or comfort - i walked into the pit and I faced the lion. And I walked back out - with faith.

Since then I’ve walked into that pit many times. Faced many lions. A living faith requires it. Because despite our desire to be so - we’re not Him. Not today, not yesterday, and chances are - not tomorrow. So we’re going to have to climb back down into the mud, or the snow, or whatever impediment exists in your internal landscape - and fight. Again and again. Because apart form attaining the perfection of Christ, we’ll make mistakes. We’ll head south only to realize we’re headed East. And we’ll get called to the pit - and we always will.

Step by halting step, to be christian is to choose to walk into that pit. To have faith is to know you’ll walk out again. And to serve - that’s to use what we learn in our fight to help others. To take our ability to face lions, to walk into that pit, and bring it out and into our community.

Because everyone is looking for something. Maybe they call it a lion. Or maybe they think its a career. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when they go looking - as I did once upon a time & you may have too - that they have a chance to find the road they need. That by taking our fight to a different beast and by fighting as a team - we can serve in creating a voice that can be heard above the din of the world. Above the TVs, the cellphones, the internert and the jobs - louder than all of it.

We’re none of us alone in that pit. We never, ever, face that lion sight unseen. We have God with us and we also have each-other. Eye to eye with the lion, we fight shoulder to shoulder with each-other. Our church becoming not a place but a home - our pastor not a remote voice but just one piece in a body so much larger than any of us; one we all own. All the while with all of us fighting our battles as they come -  as God would have it.

As a team. As a family. As a church.

Lions and tigers and bears - oh my.

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