Wild Thing

Gen 1:28-30

^"28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

²⁹ Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. ³⁰ And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so."

Over the last week I have had the unique opportunity to take full advantage of the dominion that God has given man over the created world. My friends and I for spring break packed up and shipped out to a remote place known as Virgin Falls. It is a secluded little area in eastern Tennessee. We hiked back through the sticks for four miles along a path that I'm not entirely certain a llama could have negotiated successfully through some of the most breathtaking landscape I have ever had the privilege of viewing.

On the course of our journey we passed four waterfalls, but by far the last one was the best. We set up camp by the mammoth-sized cascade and hunkered down for the night. Shortly after we all went to bed a huge lightning storm struck. Now mind you, we were on top of a mountain...so everything was rediculously close! Bolts of lightning flashed no more than a mile away, sometimes much much closer.

My friend Brian and I became intimately aquainted with the storm as rain gushed down from the sky in torrents and flowed freely all around and even under our tent. At one point, he slapped the floor of the tent and together we watched the water cause it to ripple out in all directions.

In the morning, soggy but otherwise unharmed, we marched up to a nearby cave and spent the rest of the day climbing around inside. For seven hours, we marveled at the expance and power of God captured in the sheer size and magnitude of the caverns. We ourselves were easily sixty feet above an underground river that determined the course of the cave, while the ceiling itself was an additional sixty feet up easily.

For the most part the floor was composed of rock, but every so often we would tread upon clay soft enough to break free and slide down the cliffs into the icy cold river. We had to be exceptionally careful and we spent a good deal of time "staging" slides for the thunderous noise that they made and the tremendously satisfying splashes.

On Monday we hiked out of the woods and headed back to Brian's house. We spent the next few days gathering some much-needed rest. On Thursday we went to Nashville and accidentally found ourselves in the midst of a storm that started dropping funnel clouds. We kept hearing reports warning us of the impending tornados, but were unable to see beyond a few feet outside of the van.

Then all at once we heard a whistling sound from outside the vehicle as the rain started to get sucked across the road very forcefully. We rounded a corner and watched as a police man traveling in the opposite direction turned his lights on and turned around to travel the wrong way back up the other side of the street. In a moment we all realized why this was so. Apearantly a few moments before a tornado had pulled apart several buildings on the street we had just turned onto. Power polls had been snapped in two, and cinder block buildings had been pulled to pieces. God had blessed us and preserved us while very clearly demonstrating His power.

Then today we gathered up Brian's paddle boat and went out to a rock quarry that has sinced turned into a very placid lake beside a horse trail and paddled around for the afternoon. Of course, this too became boring after a while, so my friend Jonathan and I scaled two of the cliff's barefooted and threw rocks down toward the paddle boats to attempt to splash those aboard.

At one point, a very large section of rock broke free of the cliff and nearly landed on Jon's bare foot, but by God's grace he was able to deflect it with his knee.

So all in all it has been a very grand week, and I have learned a lot about what it is to assume my duties as a man and conquer the creation. I really feel that that it is big part of what it is to be a man in God's kingdom, and would very much like to do things like that more often. There is so much to be learned about the kingdom of CHrist from the lessons of the wild and there is yet more to be learned about His diety from what can be seen in the benchmark that is His created order.