Mark 8:18
The Passion Translation
(TPT)
18 You have good eyes, yet you still don’t see, and you have good
ears, yet you still don’t hear, neither do you remember.
There was a family walking towards me on the Barker Dam
Trail. The little four or five year old had been looking up at the great rock
to his left.
“Daddy, why do they have goats on these rocks?” He queried
in typical kids full voice.
“Maybe they keep them for food for the workers in the park.”
His father plodded on, watching only where he was placing his feet on the sandy
and stony trail.
Instantly there flashed through my mind the fact that kids
are far more observant than we adults. I glanced up to the top of the great
rock to my right. My heart thrilled at the rare sight of seven beautiful desert
big horn sheep in a shady nook in the rock. They were studiously ignoring us. I
looked back at the family retreating up the trail. Fleetingly, I felt like
calling after the family and sharing with them what they were missing. I didn’t.
Someone once quipped, “Ignorance is bliss.” All they had seen were lots of
gigantic boulders and sand, and their kid had seen “goats.”
I stepped off the trail and sat down on a large rock and
watched these magnificent animals for twenty minutes or more. There were a
couple pine trees in the nook and a little green grass that some of them were
munching on. Their grayish hides rippled over powerful muscles that enable them
to nimbly leap up or down twenty feet if they wished to. Instead they stood
there eating or chewing their cud. Big horn sheep are a rare sight in Joshua
Tree National Park and I am thrilled every time I have the good luck to see
them. It’s only about once in twenty visits or so that I see these magnificent
animals that survive the harsh desert we were in.
Dozens of people walked by in both directions on the trail
in front of me. To some of them I would say, “Did you see the big horn sheep?”
and point in their direction. Many of them shared the thrill I felt, but the
majority would glance up and keep trudging. I have no idea why they took the
time to come out into this harsh desert.
How often, Lord, do I
toil down the road of life oblivious to the great beauty You place all around
me?
