Bears Don't Like Dr. Pepper

I've been promising Braeden, my six year old, that we would go camping before Charlie was born. We had it all planned out, and then Charlie got here earlier than expected. Not a big problem, we'll go after he's born. Camping in Oklahoma in the summer is not a good idea, I don't care if you have a camper and are literally on the shores of the lake, bad idea. But this past Friday I made good on my promise to take Braeden camping, so we loaded up the car, got all the camping gear, got groceries, and got to the campsite.

The evening was going rather well. We made a fire, I made dinner, and we watched a movie on my laptop in the tent. I know that watching a movie doesn't qualify as real camping but when you have a six year old with you, you have to bend the rules every now and then, right? So the movie is over, Braeden is passed out, and I go clean up from dinner, put everything up, and go to bed. At about 4:00 in the morning, Braeden wakes me up and asks if I can shut the tent door all the way (I left it cracked), and I asked him why and he said "There's something out there." I ignore it, go back to sleep, and about two minutes later I hear footsteps, and am freaked out of my mind because what Braeden saw was in fact, a bear going through our cooler, which I had brilliantly put right by the tent.

I think somewhere in the next two hours I prayed that we wouldn't die by brute force, and the bear came back a few times, successfully getting into our cooler, but I'm happy that all he got was some steak and a few hot dogs. At about 7:30 Braeden woke me up because I had just fallen asleep, and we surveyed the damage. Nothing terrible, but the bear left tracks on the cooler and I saw the bag that the steak had been in when I put it up the night before.

This post really has nothing to do with theology, the Bible, or God (except that His Sovereign hand kept us from harm!), but I wanted to share this with our readers because I think we too easily do things in life and never think about some of the consequences we might face for it. I was a Boy Scout growing up, so I knew that when you put your food up at night, you either keep it up by rope near a tree, or you put it inside where the bear or any other animal cannot reach. Every person has a choice to make everyday, most of them mundane, but it's the small choices that seem to guide where our lives go. My experience with the bear made me all the more aware of that fact, and I vowed to never put my cooler next to the tent again, and I vowed to keep it in a safe place. All that to say, please be careful in the outdoors, and if you get caught unaware by a bear, you'll become a prayer warrior in seconds.