Following the buffalo

HEARTLAND | Nate Adams

Since reading Robert Lewis’s book “Raising Modern Day Knights” several years ago, I’ve been taking father-son trips with each of our three sons – before high school, after high school, and after college. Our youngest son Ethan graduated from high school in June, and so last week we set out for Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming – the first trip there for either of us.

Yellowstone offers many amazing sights and experiences, but common to most of them, at least in mid-summer, is the chore of managing long lines of people, cars, RV’s and buses. The speed limit throughout the park’s 300 miles of roads is 45 mph, so you learn to just take it slow, and patiently wait when a long line of brake lights brings you to a stop.

That’s what happened to us the afternoon this video was taken. The cars ahead of us came to a stop, and as I leaned out the driver’s side window to see what was causing the delay, this is what I saw:

Yellowstone is almost “other worldly,” with its steaming volcanic features and its geysers and its wildlife that roam the paved roadways as routinely as they do the open prairie or mountainsides. We bring our man-made, motorized, technological world into that natural setting and then marvel when it doesn’t seem to need them, or us, to live simply and beautifully.

I wonder if that’s what it was like for the people of Jesus’ day, whether it was a rich young ruler, or a blind man, or a would-be disciple. When Jesus first walked into their world, He seemed surprising and out of place, yet amazing and miraculous and intriguing at the same time.

The more they watched Him, the more they realized He had not walked into their world, but they were living in His. Like the buffalo in this video, he calmly walked in the opposite direction, while everyone stopped and took notice. They could turn and follow Him, or continue their life journey in the opposite direction, without Him.

In Yellowstone, it was safest for us to simply take a picture, roll up the window, and move on down the highway with everyone else. But a small part of me wonders what would have happened if we had abandoned our car and our gadgets, and just followed the buffalo wherever it was going.

Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association.