Recently, I was at the lakeside home of a friend. With the really, really hot and oppressive temperatures we have had here in New England, it was
nice to sit by the lake and just relax, until, well. What you need to know is
that I have spent a good deal of my adult life doing dog rescue, and had even
met this particular friend through our many years of saving dogs from unnecessarily premature deaths. I have tried to put the "rescue" part in a much smaller part of my life but somehow it keeps popping up. So now it is fish rescue.
The tale unfolds thus:
There is a tiny stream that feeds into the lake on my friend's property. It gradually slopes down from the road into the lake, with little pockets that
fill up with water when it rains or water drains into it. Well, OK, so another
friend and I were relaxing nicely until she saw that some little fish had
been caught in the stream pockets that were rapidly drying up and extremely hot. So on went the rescue hats! We spent quite awhile trying to rescue the little ones from impending death. The "quite awhile" part came because the small fish were either unaware of their certain doom or were aware of it but still content to stay where they were and hope for the best.
They would do their utmost to hide from us, and with trying to find them, a lot
of silt muddied the water, making it worse for all of us. We could see the
dead bodies of two fish whose little pondette had already dried up. Too late!
And we knew time was of the essence for the others. One by one we captured them and put them in the lake, running quickly lest they jump out of the net
to another kind of demise. They fought us all the way, flipping and jumping
out of the little mesh screen we used to try and scoop them up with. But then,
as they were put in the large lake, after a few minutes of adjustment and
gill-full of fresh oxygen, they darted merrily into the depths.
I started to think about this and suddenly knew God was trying to show me
something. These little fish had set off in a spirit of adventure and ended
up getting trapped in a stifling pool that was drying up. Yet, they fought
those who would try to help them out and hid from them. Slowly, they would suffocate if they did not get out. They were determined but we were also determined because we knew what they did not know.
How much is this like our life with God? We often set out in search of
new ground, not knowing its dangers. We end up, off track, trapped in a small pool that will slowly suffocate us. God comes to rescue us, putting His Hands underneath us and scooping us out of the situation back into the expansive and wonderful depths of the Big Lake, and yet we try to evade Him and flip out of His Hands. Our little world has become stifling but there we sit in it, our original sense of adventure drying up with every passing minute because we are getting less and less oxygen to think and act clearly! Our sense of self-preservation can sometimes work completely against us.
In our lives with God, there is time we must be willing to get out of our stifling, rotting ponds--waters that we may have gotten into because of our own silliness or even our good intentions, but from which God must rescue us or we will die. Let us trust His hands in the changes He brings us to. They are surely meant for our good--to bring life to us. And let us, too, be aware of the little ones around us who are inches away from death, those who, also, need God's rescue, 'til we all swim happily in that Big Ocean of God in the sky. :)
