The Window

I was eighteen and just finished high school.

In early October, I drove home from Bible school for Canadian Thanksgiving. Already, in the small, northern Alberta town where my parents lived, darkness fell early in the day. On this evening, my old boyfriend and I made plans to meet for a conversation. He (I’m sure) hoped that we might get back together (we didn’t); I hoped that the fresh ways I’d connected with God would inspire and help him in his faith journey without me.  

He collected me from my parents’ place in his two-door car, and we drove off with no particular destination in mind. It wasn’t as if our little town had charming coffee shops, forty years ago, before Starbucks, before even McDonalds came to the area. So he drove the familiar back-country roads as we talked, the forest dimming around us as the evening wore on. With the conversation becoming deeper, we decided to find a quiet place to stop the car, a place we could talk undisturbed. He turned down a one-track lane adjacent to the golf course and turned off the engine. The early autumn was not so chilly that we needed the car heater to be comfortable. We turned to face one another, the interior light allowing us to see.  

We talked a long while, mainly (if I’m honest) because I had so much to say about my experience at Bible school. I felt genuinely changed and so spoke with enthusiastic fervour, looking at his familiar face, his familiar form where he sat in the driver’s seat. Until, over his left shoulder, something completely unexpected shocked me mid-sentence out of my impassioned speech.

Two palms pressed against the driver-side window. 

“Turn off the light!” I shouted, unable to see anything past the window and the impossible reality of those fleshy palms. He reached for the light switch, dropping us abruptly into darkness.

The black bear’s head became instantly visible as it peered at us through the glass. It sniffed, its clawed, hairy paws pressed against the window, impossibly close. Our bodies spasmed in shock as we imagined, suddenly terrified, what might happen if the glass broke under this weight. 

The bear removed its paws from the window, dropping back onto all fours. It began to saunter slowly around the front of the vehicle towards me. My companion shouted urgently to me, “Lock your door!  Lock your door!” For a flickering moment I looked at him in disgust. Even then I knew that a locked door was not the solution to my safety. Instead, out of my spirit-filled zeal and firm belief in God, I began to pray out loud, “rebuking” (the term we used at school) the bear in the name of Jesus. Undeterred, the bear walked towards me and stopped outside my window so that, save for the glass, our faces were inches apart. Perhaps it finally heard my desperate, shouted prayers. After a few moments it turned to walk quietly away into the dark. We two in the car began to breathe again.

The surprising aspect of this story, when retold, is not so much that we encountered a bear. There are many bears in that remote part of the forested north. What makes me roll my eyes, embarrassed, is that neither of us thought of several painless solutions which no doubt were obvious to you, reader:  (1) honk the horn, or (2) turn on the vehicle and drive away.

We knew far less about brain function forty years ago. I understood nothing of the difference between the pre-frontal cortex and the brainstem, the rational brain versus the emotional brain. But during my life, in a few situations such as this, my rational brain function shut down as fear took over. All I could see was the bear.

I’ve pondered recently the events of that night because, to my surprise (and the surprise of those who know us), my husband and I are suddenly in the midst of a huge change – a move of nearly 3000 km/1500 miles from our small city in Saskatchewan to Birmingham, Alabama. While we were comfortably in our known, safe space, a big opportunity sniffed us out and came to find us. Remarkably (and largely due to the support and encouragement of family and trusted friends) we haven’t run away. It’s an invitation into a larger space where we both can continue to grow.

But the steps involved in this international move are many and often feel overwhelming. Especially at night, when the dark presses in, we can feel small and terrified because all we can think of are the scary things, “the bear”, that might hurt us or the loved ones we leave in Canada. We lose sight of the big picture, feel deeply our own human vulnerability, and seek an outlet to ease the panic in our bodies. Lock the door? Speak a suitable prayer of rebuke? Where is God during these times, or our sense of God?  A recent night was one of those nights, and the impact on our bodies lingered through the day in most uncomfortable ways.  

The old black bear back in the woods that night deserved our attention. My ex and I were right to see and respond to it. But all the power in that moment was given to the bear. Overcome by fear, we missed seeing our own agency with any clarity – yet also missed out on the chance to receive with wonder and delight a truly unique encounter.  

When I was a young person, the last of our family to live at home with my parents, my father would sometimes interrupt a long road trip, turning down a gravel lane leading to an open garbage dump, hopefully expectant that we might discover a bear. Together we would sit in the car just to watch it rummage around and we would smile at one another, so glad and grateful to experience this fresh seeing. 

Much of what we fear will happen to us (thanks, non-rational brainstem) is an imagined panorama of possible bad things, not the real thing. It’s the freaky “story I’m making up in my head” that sucks so much joy out of the experiences of daily life. So, in community with the people who love us, I want to be reminded in my body that when the fear takes over, I may lose out on actual opportunities to envision and enter into this graced world. 

God himself, as we remember in this season, felt as a human body what it meant to be vulnerable. Still, he entered fully into the risky business of living, confident that so much more was in play than could be seen. Remind me, oh remind me the next time it peers into my window, that fear is never truly the only Presence in my range of vision. It may even be that the palms pressed against the dim glass are the hands of a loving, compassionate saviour, in whose company is comfort and light whenever fear stalks too close.