Who is Able to Lead and Guide?

July 2005 07 22
Who is Able to Lead and Guide?

Proceeding on in search of the headwaters of the Missouri River and the Shoshone Indians Lewis and the river crew meet up with Clark’s battered land party. I have not traveled through prickly pear cactus and can only imagine the ongoing nemesis it continues to present to the men traveling overland.

As all travelers have discovered, if you keep moving your current troubles will at some point fade away. The men had to be hoping this would soon happen with the prickly pear cactus. At some point it must lose the climate it needs to dominate the landscape. Foreboding as they must have been, the high, rugged mountains ahead had to at least hold the promise of relief from the needles that were shredding their feet. My guess is that they also had great hope that the hordes of mosquitoes would abate as they entered the high mountains.

Lewis records another eighty-degree day and then promptly leaves his thermometer behind and dispatches Sgt. Ordway to retrieve it.

The teenage wife and mother on the trip assures the Captains that she recognizes the country of her childhood. She clearly states that they are near the Missouri’s headwaters. Captain Lewis genuinely fears that they may stumble across another obstacle like the Great Falls. He finds Sacagawea’s reassurances of little comfort to his worries as he surveys the increasingly mountainous terrain. He can’t imagine that some natural obstacle will not impede their progress.

Remember that this is 1805. Sacagawea is the sixteen-year-old squaw wife of a French employee of the Corps. It would be years before American women could even vote. Captain Clark kept York as a slave and servant. The Civil War was sixty years in the future. Meriwether Lewis must have taken Sacagawea’s observations with a large dose of skepticism. Even though she had shown herself to have great courage and resourcefulness it had to be difficult for the experienced military leaders to take her advice as expert.

We look back and see that perhaps Lewis and Clark were not as “enlightened” as we assume we are regarding slavery and the rights and value of women. One thing I have learned in my fifty-one years of living is that the human condition applies to all of us. Regardless of time and station in life. False pride, overweening self-importance, selfishness and wanton desire have no boundaries and expiration dates. Human frailty and failing has transgressed all time and dogged our existence since the Fall of Man and banishment from the Garden of God in Eden.

Can we see our own darkness? Are we discounting counsel we should be heeding? Have we dismissed divine guidance because of carnal ignorance and prejudice? I know I have. Who holds and gives counsel that is “immutable”? Who is able to lead and guide from outside time and human frailty?  In the answer to this question is found the key to life and living. “Seek Me and you will find Me,” declares the One who created you.