I watched as “our” doe carefully left summer’s forest foliage and led her offspring onto our small backyard lawn. I call her our doe because she’s spent many seasons near my wife and me, emerging often from the woodsy area behind our house. I recognize our doe’s profile; she has a long nose, for a Whitetail. Most years she’s given birth to two fawns.
Some neighbors don’t like deer munching flowers and raiding vegetable gardens, but I let Bambi eat anything he wants in our yard.
As I viewed our doe and her “fawn-tastic” entourage from our laundry room window, I thought about how deer usually don’t linger too long in one grazing spot.
Someone said creatures with eyes located in the sides of their heads are prey and those with eyes fixed in the fronts of their heads are predators. Early Egyptians and painter Pablo Picasso sometimes depicted men with eyes on the sides of their heads, but we know where men’s eyes are located.
Until the lion shall lie down with the lamb, we’ll need God’s unmerited favor to change and tame our predatory inner natures.
I knew I had promises to keep and miles to go before my workday began, but I continued watching the doe and fawns until a feeling of guilt came over me, a feeling involving more than concern about being late to work.
Somehow, I felt guilty for enjoying a few unanticipated moments of reflection on God’s creation.
It seemed unfair that I should be viewing such a peaceful scene while many in our world were enduring trials, tribulations and suffering: a friend three houses away from ours has a son serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq; a young minister friend recently underwent cancer surgery: some relatives and friends who are dear to me seem set in patterns I believe lead to self-destruction.
I wondered about the conflict I felt in my heart: “God, how do we reconcile quiet deer on green grass on a pleasant morning with all the conflicts in this world?”
Of course, I knew the answer I see in the Bible: Adam’s sin and that sin “visited on his children” caused evil to weave itself into the sinew and soul of mankind; Christ died and rose from the dead to remove the curse of sin; those who receive Christ by faith are “saved from wrath that will come later” but must deal with, even conquer, sin’s effects while passing through this physical world.
The deer in our yard moved quietly toward the woods. I had enjoyed an early morning glimpse of the Garden of Eden as it might have been, but worry and concern had given me only a few moments of pleasure before awakening from their light sleep and occupying their workbenches in the mill of my mind.
We are most troubled when we worry about things only God can fix, someone said, and another writer observed: “Our cares are attached to the sins of the world that Christ died for.”
Our deer disappeared into the green wood, and I drove to my workplace. Later, I thought about Jesus’ words: “Take no thought for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink…Behold the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?”
And I thought about Psalm 42:1: “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul longs for Thee, O God.”
Steve Crain may be reached at crain207@earthlink.net.
