Rabbit

Once we had a rabbit who lived in a hutch.

It worried my daughter that the rabbit could not freely hop about, so she spent all her money on a chicken wire fence and enclosed a square of grassy yard.

She took the high wooden legs off the hutch and lowered it to the ground. It was almost dark when she opened its door and the rabbit hopped out into the summer evening.

My bed was next to a long window. Until dawn I lay watching sleepily as the rabbit hopped and hopped and hopped under the full moon.

The tenderness of that night has never left me, and I remember as well my own still shyness, as if I had happened upon a secret, as if I were watching God dancing alone in His garden.

What gentle God thoughts dwell in animals I will never know, but I can guess from the joy I have seen in them.

Once on a warm spring morning I was walking down a country road, and I saw a horse running through a meadow. The horse would throw himself down into the flowers and roll happily in the dirt, then get back up and gallop away again.

The bright sunshine, the meadow, the running horse--suddenly I saw their connection to each other, with God as the connector; even I as an observer was drawn into and made a part of all I saw. I felt the breathing of His kingdom, and His great pleasure.

Perhaps God is calling me to play, too: lately, at the oddest moments—when I am pulling weeds in the garden, or walking to the post office—I feel a tingling, yearning surge of playfulness welling up in me; I suddenly picture myself falling down into the flowers and tumbling in the dirt, laughing up at the sky, getting tangles and ladybugs in my hair.

I wonder: is this a different way, a new way, for me to know God? Have I somehow formed an image of an old and fussy and sensible man, when instead God is droll and playful, a child who wants to run on the grass, a rabbit who wants to hop in the moonlight, a horse who wants to roll in flowers?

I believe I am being called to experience the every-moment newness and wonder of my life, to open my eyes wide! I believe God wishes this because we are living this life together, God and I, and through me He has one more unique and unrepeatable experience of His world.

I have a happy little girl with skinned knees living in me, and she knows very well how to sing Fairest Lord Jesus loudly as she skips down the sidewalk; her world is always new and wonderful; she is small and close to the grass; she feels the summer sun's heat on her face. She is the tenderest child of God, and she never questions His delight in her. She is dwelling shyly behind my eyes, looking wistfully out on the Kingdom of Heaven.

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