Although it is true that the Scots explorers and traders lacked the religious motivation of Jesuit missionaries who traversed this wilderness, they had the next best thing. They had grown up in an environment of mountain ruggedness, lochs, and solitude that provided an ideal practical training ground for exploring the North American West. John Rae, for example, positively relished the Orkney gales. As he recalled in his reminiscences:

I delighted in being out in the worst of weather—snow-storms in winter, rain and gales all the year round. Cared nothing for, and felt no harm from being soaking wet either with salt or fresh water all day long—for a waterproof coat was never thought of."

The innumerable challenges of Highland and Island life — especially the necessity of being at the beck and call of the clan leader—produced generations of rugged men and women. The women were as hardy as the men. They often went barefoot, wearing shoes only for special occasions such as attending church. Eighteenth-century traveler Edward Burt observed barefoot Highland women stomping their washing in tubs "when their legs and feet are almost literally as red as blood with the cold." During the herring season Highland women from Sutherland would walk the 130 miles to Wick in Caithness without any type of shelter. When the herring boats unloaded their catch, the women remained outside in all types of weather to gut the fish. They cleaned about thirty-five fish a minute and could keep up the pace for hours on end. Not surprisingly, these women often led Northern crofter anti-Clearance agitation. In the 1841 riot at Durness and the 1842 protest at Lochsheil, women sporting shearing hooks and with aprons filled with stones chased away the evicting officers.

Such a culture thrived on stories of endurance and bravado. Legends told of Highland soldiers on maneuvers who marched overland carrying just a bag of oatmeal and a small stone on which to heat it at night. For rest, they rolled up tightly in their homespun wool plaids and stretched out on the bare ground. When the temperature dropped near freezing, they would occasionally dip their plaids into a stream to freeze them and sleep inside a coating of ice not unlike a snow cave. One clan chieftain was chaffed by his men as "soft" when he was seen making a pillow out of snow (sometimes out of a rock).

So, if you are separated from your formal education by a few years, it is very possible that you've faced the frustration of having someone, usually a child, ask you something that you know you knew, but now don't.  I'm not talking about a senior moment, but rather about the ephemeral nature of memory.  Certain facts we use with regularity are ingrained into our minds and become like riding a bike.  But others, remain frustratingly familiar, but the details are foggy or absent.  What about if you've been a few years from certain exercises.  It's surprising how even a relatively fit person, can jump on a horse, or a bike, or lifts some weights after having not done so for a while, and find that specific muscles have weakened and the coordination required for performance is rusty.  We must practice our skills, whether they used refined thinking or fine motor skills or even brute strength, if we are to maintain or progress. 

So what about Faith?   I am no world traveler, or expert in human suffering.  I recognize that there are sick and dying and abused and poor people across the globe.  Do we suffer in America?  Please don't misunderstand, someone whose child is dying of cancer is suffering.  Someone whose life is disassembled by the activities of a drunk driver or any other crime suffers.  We are not in a utopia and we are not immune to suffering.  But we are soft.  On a daily basis, we tend to lack the obsticals to survival that make people strong.  We lack the challenges which hone the edge and temper the metal of our lives.  Our poor are fat.  Where else in the world are those within a society who "lack" obese from excess.  And since we are not wandering the deserts, waiting on God for provision of manna and quail, do we wait on Him at all?  When we get sick, don't we go to the doctor?  I do.  And if I'm lucky I get into a wonderful theological discussion about why we don't see more miracles in America while sitting in the waiting room.  I wait for the doctor, yet do not wait on God.  I think I have a good work ethic.  I don't cheat people.  I feel I earn my money fair and square.  I have never, not once, given it all away and trusted God to care for me.  I've never even gone on a trip and trusted in God for his provisions.  I pray for safety and all, but I stack the deck in my favor, you know, in case God is busy or whatever, by being prepared.  Such a good Boy Scout.  How in the world is God going to bless me if I spend my life doing it all for myself.  Is it wrong to sae for retirement?  I don't know, but I know that by hoarding possessions now (we call it being good stewards of God's provisions) instead of investing them in the Kingdom to those who need them now, we may think we're showing wisdom for the future... but what is God's example to us?  In the desert, we were do only gather enough for one day (two on the day before the Sabbath) so that our attention, our passion, our focus, our trust was on God.  For 40 YEARS!!!!  He ingrained this lesson into His people.   How quickly they/we forgot.  How is God going to reveal Himself through the miraculous when I rush off to hedge my bets with other treatments, remedies, or doctors.  We give lip service to our love of God... "God held the hand of my surgeon and made it successful!"  Is this the kind of accolade the creator of the universe deserves?  He took the time to guide the surgeon but didn't heal us on His own?  Isn't that a bit impotent, rather than omnipotent?  Does God hold surgeon's hands?  Of course, and he keeps us safe and protects us from harm.  He gets credit for creating bodies that can heal and perform all manner of biological, biochemical miracles just to keep alive.  I am not at all diminishing God's hand in all that is good.  Just being careful not to mistake God's support with God's miracles.  I worry that when we make a quick recovery from an illness a "miracle" of God, then we begin, whether consciously or not, to look at God's abilities in this context.  God created the universe!!!!!   He raises from the dead, he floods planets, he parts seas.  If we lose track of the immensity of His power, by thinking that my sore back healing in only a week is God's manner of providing, we trivialize what He wants to do for us. 

But do we give him a chance to do these things and get the Glory He deserves, or have we penned Him into providing on our terms, and risking the world dismissing us, and thus Him, as coincidence.  When every time something happens, and we declare it a miracle, unbelievers roll their eyes.  They, who are not knowledgable about creation and the miracles of astronomy, physics, biology, etc..., write things off as "natural," disdaining the uneducated "supernatural."  So when we train them to believe that we think "miracles" are what they think of as "natural" we rob God of the audience He desires of these unbelievers.  He wants to wow them and us by healing them all.  Instead, we celebrate that the compound W got the wart off in record time, and in our effort to give God the glory, which HE DOES DESERVE!!!, we aggrandise God's daily miracles of creation and confuse them with the actual awesome power which he holds ready for display.  Will God perform His miracles to a crowd who has predetermined that He is a fake.  That His people are desperate crutch weilders who just want reassurance in a complicated world.  Maybe we don't see the "big stuff" because we don't wait long enough for His timing to be right.  Saul didn't wait for the offering to be made... he went to war after making his own offering.  It wasn't God's timing.  He LOST HIS KINGDOM!!!  Moses thought God wasn't making quite the right impact with the whole water out of the rock.  Sometimes God just needs a boost, a little help with PR, a little glitz and glitter.  The starry heavens above and the nuclear inferno of the sun maybe be impressive to some, but speaking to a rock???  C'mon, let's give it a whack.....   He LOST THE PROMISED LAND!!!!   When we take the glory from God, when we turn the emphasis to anything else, we disempower Him.  He doesn't want to be the God who helped the surgeon do an extra neat job.  HE IS THE SURGEON!   We just need to get out of His way, and stay out.  Much easier said than done, and I am the number one faith coward, relying on the natural resources God has been so gracious to provide, rather than the supernatural resources He promises daily.  Pray that I get stronger, and find ways to deny myself, and exercise my Faith muscles.  The victory is so much greater when it is undeniably God, and if credit goes to someone else??? maybe it's not a victory after all.   Remember, if the enemies' arrows blot out the sun... fight them in the shade!!!!