Yesterday, my friend Jason and I drove to the hunting lease. The lease is a country expanse, a wide valley of cleared pasture, thicket, and hardwoods. It is well kept and quiet, an attractive refuge for Ozark wildlife, for the field mice and the quail, for the owl and the squirrel, for the rabbit, for the deer.
This is the season of deer culling, of thinning the herd with bow or rifle. It is the working man’s sport in the Natural State, a season where Arkansans disappear into the woods, where they tap into their primitive instincts and return to the art of the hunt.
We pulled to the outskirts of a wooded valley, a blanket of snow still covering the underbrush. He tossed me a bag of corn from the back of the Jeep and grabbed one of his own, and we tromped through the snow and down a deer path.
There were deer prints in the days-old snow. Bucks, does, and yearlings, the herd all leaving their mark. The snow had been on the ground for a week, and so the daily movements of the deer are imprinted on the hillside. Every morning, after drinking at the stream to the southeast of the wood, the deer come up the embankment and skirt the forest. They walk to the north for almost one hundred yards and turn back to the west for less than a stone’s throw. They circle back to the south and pause at a sort of deer crossroads.
We are standing at the deer crossroads.
“Here,” he says, and splits open his bag of corn. He pours it on the ground in a long line, and I follow suit. Over his right shoulder, I see the deer stand. This is his ambush spot.
“I try to pour the corn in a long line, hoping that it turns the deer broadside to my stand.” Jason is a man of calculated words, and even in his hunting he is a strategic fellow. “From here,” he says, “it’s about a twenty-yard shot.”
I look at the expanse of wood. It is a wide area with room to roam, but even still, the deer tracks for the most part follow the same lines. They are creatures of telltale habit. They are predictable to a fault, to the death.
There are buzzards in the trees. They were circling over the fields this morning, they with their wide wings and rounded tails circling over some dead or dying creature. I don’t see them now, but I can feel their beady black eyes hiding behind the branches. The buzzards stay hidden in the places of death; they are always looking for scraps of a kill.
We finish pouring the corn and walk back to the Jeep along the deer path. There are coyote tracks mixed with the deer tracks. Something else has been hunting this herd. Another pack has been looking to pick off a sick, wounded, or dying doe.
The hunter, the buzzard, the coyote—each is a different kind of predator; each, though, follows the predictable movements of the unsuspecting deer. The herd is oblivious to their stalking. They will stop and eat the corn one evening, consider it a great gift from the heavens before one of their members feels the sting of the broadhead arrow tip.
The crossroads, the corn, the tree stand, this place in the wood—it is all a setup.
It would be fool’s folly to believe ourselves any less predictable than the deer. It is primal instinct, the survival mechanism that bends us toward the same paths as those before us. We walk the well-worn path, are hunted in our own right. For thousands of years, we’ve wandered into this human experiment all doe-eyed, only to be ambushed. And if we survive the attack, we so often return to the place of our wounding, relive the trauma, allow it to traumatize us again and again.
Jesus teaches us a different way. Well acquainted with his accusers, he did not shirk the pain or limp away. Instead, he blazed a trail into the heart of persecution, stared down death meted out at the hands of his own creation, and at his ultimate end, he extended forgiveness.
This is the way of love.
For the last several days, I have been practicing the way of Jesus. In my morning meditations, I’ve followed him into the pains of my history. Here I’ve written of the faith healer, of the well-meaning pious, of those who’ve used theologies like too many swords. There are others too—perhaps family members, friends, and colleagues. I’ve been sitting in my morning chair; I’ve been retracing my steps back through the pain until I find arrows. There I’ve stopped and spoken forgiveness over the person.
Though I suppose this could be done in the recesses of the heart, I have chosen to speak forgiveness aloud. “Father, Father, Father—I forgive the faith healer, whose unwise words robbed me of childlike faith,” I’ve said. Perhaps it’s laughable, speaking words to the wind this way, but I find that hearing my own pronouncement of forgiveness does something for my heart. I speak the words, and I feel the release of pain. I speak the words, and I feel the hope of a freer life.
Less wary of the trees these days, I’ve waded back through the snow and into the place of my ambush. I have practiced love in the way of forgiveness, and I’m finding myself less thirsty for coping mechanisms. I’m finding myself less in need of the liquor that numbed me up, that led me stumbling only and ever into death.
Titus walks into the room this morning, ribs exposed. He is still not gaining weight. He crawls into my lap and asks me to fill his juice cup. He is a snuggling, good-natured child who is still unaware of his sickness.
Last night, he lay in his bed and called out like only a two-year-old can: “Jesus! Jesus! You there, Jesus?” Maybe he hears things I can’t. Maybe children better understand the nature of an abiding God.
At only two, Titus is finding the way to his own mesquite trees.
Will Titus receive healing? I don’t know. But this I know: he is calling out to Jesus in his sickness. I can’t protect him from the disappointment of an abiding sickness; I can’t protect his Ozark maple grove. I can’t insure his childlike faith will not be unwound. But I can show him a better way than the path I chose for myself.
I’m pressing deeper into the way of Jesus, and I feel a healing coming. This one, though, is mine.