Tennessee Temptation
I can't believe I'm watching a peregrine falcon devouring a small, freshly killed bird in the top of a dead tree.
As I stand on the side of a mountain in Eastern Tennessee, a half mile up, what could be better?
"That's disgusting," my wife, Leasa, says, quickly moving on up the trail with our daughters, Barbara and Bonnie, and Ashley, Bonnie's college room mate.
Well, yes, the ugly can be easy enough to notice in nature. But the not-so-nice is sometimes not-so-visible in human nature.
You see, about an hour ago, I was struggling with a temptation. As our little team stopped to take photos at a stream crossing and prepared to enter a small, up-trail tunnel, its walls offered tiny shelves, each with dozens of small rocks, glistening in water seeping from the mountain. They had curious, arrow-head and knife-edge shapes. Wouldn't they look great in my rock collection at home?
Now, I know that in a national park, here in the Smokeys, I'm not supposed to take anything, but at that moment, the saying, "take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints," was lost to me.
"They look so interesting," Ashley said, suddenly appearing nearby. Interesting, indeed.
To this rock hound, they look like gems in one of those rotating display cases at Zales.
So, what's a father and group leader to do?
Rewind to 16 years earlier and two thousand miles away in the canyons of Western New Mexico, where I stood holding an Anasazi pottery shard. It was just me and a photographer from my company, scouting a photo location, and he was looking the other way. Who would know? I could just slip it into my pocket.
Perhaps I sensed what Adam felt when God asked where he and Eve were, after a bite of forbidden fruit; I had a case of guilt creeping up in my gut. Do you know that feeling? Well, I knew that if I kept the pottery shard, every time I saw it, that little electric stomach shock would surface. So, I put the shard back where it was, and this time, I learned and didn't even touch the rocks.
At that moment, a verse from earlier in the morning returned: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols."
"Amen."
P.S. I know that some readers may see taking one rock from a national forest as no big deal. But one pebble in the wrong place can cause an avalanche of woes. Conversely, one well spoken word or action can bring immense benefits. For example, the verse above - 1 John 5:21 - was read from a King James Bible that I found this morning, exactly on the page left opened by our cabin rental owner and placed on the coffee table... What's more, the Bible was provided by The Gideons International... And so forth and so on.
Guy Cantwell works in Houston, TX, where he also serves as a deacon & teacher at his home church, helping other husbands and fathers invest in the spiritual growth of their families, while modeling family missions.
