Joy in the Trees

“Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”

 —Psalm 90:14 (ESV)

Mercy in the Trees

I’ve seen bears before.

Black bears. Grizzlies. Far away. Up close. Alaska. Wyoming. Every encounter is special. This one, however, was different. This one moved me.

I spotted this little guy in May of 2010 on maybe the weirdest, most stressful morning of my life. A colleague and I were returning to Grassy Narrows First Nation in Ontario, Canada. We were there on a mission trip with college students, and the students needed groceries.

On the way into town that morning, we stopped to check out two separate car wrecks. The lights were still on in the vehicles. One had hit a tree. Another had flipped into a ditch. We searched quickly, but both seemed abandoned.

The wrecks were about a half mile apart. Halfway between them, we had to stop suddenly when a woman stepped into the road.

She was crying, frantic, bleeding, and soaked from the rain. She had been beaten, and the man who did it was still in the house with her children.

“I don’t care what he does to me,” she said, “but he has my babies in there.”

We had no idea what to do. There was a real chance he was armed, drunk, and angry. We were foreigners in a foreign land. This was not something we had been trained for.

Before we could decide, she begged us to go get help. We did not feel good about leaving her, but she was adamant. There was a police station nearby, so we headed that way. Before we got there, we found an ambulance and told them what had happened. They explained they were there because they knew there would be unreported incidents that needed to be dealt with.

To them, it seemed, it was just another Saturday morning on the Rez.

The police station was empty, but we were able to use an emergency phone to reach a dispatch before we moved on.

A couple of hours later, groceries loaded and nerves still frayed, we were on our way back when we saw him.

A bear cub.

He poked his head out from behind a tree just in time for us to see him as we passed. Of course we stopped. How could we not?

The rain had stopped, and after scanning from the road for minute--looking for mama bear--we watched this little guy hanging out and living his best bear life. Nothing was fixed. Nothing we had witnessed that morning suddenly made sense. The brokenness was still broken. The worry was still real. The heaviness did not disappear.

But it was interrupted.

That small moment of wonder did not explain the chaos. It simply reminded me it was not the only thing present. There was still beauty in the woods. Still surprise. Still joy hiding behind a tree.

I went from stressed to blessed, and it only took a moment.

Creation does that sometimes. It does not answer every question. It does not erase every sorrow. But it can stop us long enough to remember that God is still giving gifts, even on the strangest and most stressful mornings of our lives.

Sometimes joy roars.

Sometimes it peeks out from behind a birch tree.