Hunters & Gatherers

My brother came to visit last week, to hunt for deer on our little parcel of Virginia.  He's a skilled and experienced hunter who relies on the deer season to both stretch his grocery dollar and to satisfy his taste for venison.  Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, he had only gotten one deer while hunting back home in Pennsylvania. While I welcomed his visit it made me rather anxious, worrying that the deer I saw so frequently would be elsewhere while my brother was here.  I didn't want him to go home empty handed after 150 miles of driving!

Although he saw many deer, he'd still had no success by the beginning of the last evening's hunt.  Then finally, at dark, I heard him return to the house and with apprehension went to see how things had gone.... He got one! Hooray!  It wasn't the giant deer he'd seen within the first moments of his first day's hunting, and it was only one deer, but it was a respectably-sized creature, a buck, and as my brother said to me, it was "the one I was supposed to have."   Then followed the gutting, and the dragging, and the cutting and packing into the cooler of the venison.  It was all quite exciting, and everyone was happy - and relieved!

My brother's comment about this deer being the one he was supposed to have, got me to thinking about God's providence.  As I said, my brother is a good hunter, and that's not just my sisterly bias.  All who know him would say the same.  And yet, he still had only one deer to his credit before his visit.  Despite the hours and days spent hunting, carefully, patiently waiting and watching, still he had little success. What was up with that?

Well, what's up is that God gives us what we're supposed to have.  Those who hunt and gather from nature, I think, are more tuned in to the truth that all things come from God.  All the hunting experience and skill in the world is not going to guarantee a kill, nor will foolish carelessness ensure that you'll never bring home meat.  God provides.  Skill and experience make the whole thing easier, but ultimately its God's providence that allows hunters to bring home the venison.

The fact of God's providence is more apparent to hunters than to herders, and to foragers than to farmers.  Because they are involved in so many more parts of the process - feeding and breeding and tending their animals - herders are more likely to think that the success of their livestock is merely the natural result of their good husbandry.  Similarly, farmers who plant and weed and water a field to grow a crop are more likely than foragers (who roam the woods and fields gathering wild plants) to see a bountiful harvest as nothing more than than the fruit of their hard work.

And when we step back even farther in the process and consider the majority of us, who's only regular experience with  "hunting and gathering" is in the retail setting of grocery or department store, it's even easier to see our bounty as nothing more than the natural and inevitable result of our own skill and hard work.

We work at jobs and earn money.  We take our money to the store and buy what we want.  Unless you are foolish enough to be shopping for milk and toilet paper on the eve of Snow-mageddon, you ARE going to find what you set out to buy.  Americans in general have plenty of money, and the county I live in (Loudoun, VA) has the dubious honor of being one of the wealthiest counties in the nation.  We have plenty of money and more than enough stuff to buy with it.

This way of life makes it easy to forget that everything we have has come to us as a gift of God's grace.

"All things come of Thee, and of Thine own have we given Thee." (KJV, 1 Chronicles, 29:14b)
"Everything comes from You, and we have given You only what comes from Your hand." (NIV) 

If you think about it, though, everything truly comes from God.  He knit us together in our mother's womb with our various traits and tendencies.  He placed us in a family with particular people to train and nurture us. God placed skills and talents in each of us, and gave us opportunities to use and develop them.  Both the corporate executive and the backwoods hunter are equally beholden to God for their ability to make a living.

I invite you to spend 24 hours intentionally looking at your life with the eyes of a humble hunter or a grateful gatherer.  Notice all the things you take for granted, as the fruit of your labors, and think back through the steps that gave you the ability or opportunity to have those things in the first place.  Thank God for the great bounty that He, not you, has provided.