Elk

ByHal Hammons

Have you seen the one in which a man is being attacked by a bull elk?  The man is trying desperately to keep a tree between himself and the massive beast.  Every once in a while the elk would bellow angrily.  (Who knew a big deer, essentially, could sound so mean?)  The man, wisely, did not choose to run in those moments; no doubt the elk would have run him down easily.

We know all of this because the cameraman was more interested in creating a viral YouTube video than, you know, saving his buddy’s life.  Priorities, people.

Anyway, the man finally climbed the tree (what took him so long to figure that out is beyond me) while the elk’s back was turned.  When the elk wheeled around again, the man was nowhere to be found.  It looked back and forth, back and forth, clearly searching for the man.  He never looked up.  I suppose the elk, not being in one of those fancy tree-climbing orders of mammals, could not relate to the notion of his quarry escaping into the third dimension of space.

But what about humans?  Sure, we get the whole 3-D thing; an entire category of feature films is predicated upon it.  But aren’t we just as narrowminded as the elk?  We have a notion of God and are driven to seek Him out (Acts 17:27), but we don’t understand Him well enough to look in the right place.  If He looks more like “a sound of a gentle blowing” than a raging fire or earthquake (see 1 Kings 19:11-14 for the relevant reference), we miss Him entirely.

But just because we don’t see Him, that doesn’t mean He isn’t there.  We just have to broaden our minds a bit, open up to new possibilities.

Look up, brethren.  Look up.

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I fear some of us do not have an excuse quite so good.

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This time of year, most of us have cultural, familial, and guilt-induced obligations to bestow gifts on various ones near and (to one degree or another) dear to us.  For the Hammons family, thankfully, our holiday shopping is just about concluded.  (I deceive.  Apologies.  Tracie’s holiday shopping is just about concluded.)

But I keep hearing talk about Jesus being “the reason for the season.”  I like Kylie’s response to that saying — “That’s ridiculous,” she says.  “Jesus is the reason for everything.”  (They do make you proud, don’t they?) 

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A study commissioned by Hasbro revealed that fully 68 percent of Monopoly players have never read the rules.  I believe it.  Like most people, I learned Monopoly by listening to an experienced player explain the rules.  As a result, I have always played some bits of the game wrongly.  Free Parking, for instance.  It does nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

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A 9-year-old boy in Wales has lost an eye to a Nerf gun.  This is not the beginning of a joke.  This is the conclusion to a two-act tragedy.  It seems he lost sight in the eye because of an incident with a toy arrow when he was only 3; the second incident caused irreversible damage to the eye, forcing him to have it removed entirely or else risk losing sight in the second eye as well.

The mother, who is raising money through crowdfunding to get her son a more realistic prosthetic eye, says she doesn’t want people to think she is a bad mother.  I wonder why she would feel compelled to say that?

Comma

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The punctuation Nazis (generally indistinguishable from grammar Nazis and syntax Nazis) come out from under their rocks and rail about the Oxford comma every few months.  This, unfortunately, was one of those months.