COLUMN: Getting lost on a bird watching trip was a salutory lesson for me
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Food for Thought by Sandy Sutherland
I seem to make a habit of getting lost.
Once I managed it in a car park in Dundee, or to be precise it wasn’t me that was lost – it was my car.
It was a multi-storey car park and I was sure I’d left the vehicle on level three. But what I hadn’t realised was that there were two car parks attached to the same shopping centre - and I was looking in the wrong one!
This was embarrassing enough, but a year earlier I managed to get lost in Caithness.
My friend, Bob, and I went out onto the pancake-flat Flow Country to photograph an Arctic Skua at its nest. After taking all the pictures I wanted, I signalled to Bob, using a white handkerchief out the back window of the canvas camouflaged hide, to come and take over from me.
“I’ll meet you back at the car”, I told him. It was just at this point that low-lying mist started to roll in from the sea.
Bob indicated: “The car’s that way; just look for the tree on the horizon.” I disagreed, but there was no time to argue so I headed off my own way.
The more I walked, the more I thought perhaps Bob was right. But stubbornness set in and I yomped on, convincing myself that I was heading in the right direction. Sinking into the peatbog habitat, my head was as waterlogged as my feet.
I had a burden on my back comprising a spare hide, a portable seat, tripod, camera and lenses, to say nothing about the weight of the packed lunch.
If anyone had seen me, they would have thought that I looked like Bunyan’s Pilgrim in the Slough of Despond with a burden on his back! But at least Bunyan’s Pilgrim was travelling in the right direction.
There was, however, one sign that showed me I was heading in the wrong direction. To my right there appeared, momentarily above the mist, the Eiffel Tower-like mast of the Rumster TV transmitter.
If I was walking in the right direction, the mast would have been be on my left.
Yet I convinced myself that I was still on the right track and that I had walked so far off course that I must now be walking on the north side of the mast.
In my stubbornness to convince myself that I was right, I actually reasoned the evidence away. “I’m not lost at all! I’ll slog on my way.”
Eventually, to my horror, yet paradoxically, to my considerable relief, I realised that I was wrong. Why the change of attitude? Using binoculars from a slightly elevated position, the mist lifted long enough for me to spot the tree on the now very far horizon.
Like the Prodigal Son, who came to his senses in the far country, I had to turn back. I had ignored Bob’s advice and, to suit my own theory, I had even misinterpreted the evidence. I don’t know what was worse – slogging double the distance necessary or to have to grovel to Bob, admitting that he had been right, all along.
I comforted myself with the thought that “all things work for good”. At the very least, I’d lose two or three pounds in weight improving my poor, out-of-condition, sitting-behind-a-desk body.
My lost experience illustrates how it can be in spiritual things—heading our own way rather than going in the direction of the “tree” (the Cross) of the Lord Jesus Christ, not heeding the advice of Christian friends and reasoning the evidence away.
Rev Sandy Sutherland is a retired Free Church minister living in Brora.
