It’s either blindingly good or the pits.
Some days it makes you feel great.
Other days things happen that could almost break your heart!
But this week we’ve had something happening that for undisclosed reasons feels really disturbing and weird.
(Now, don’t panic, it’s nothing too gory!)
Slightly disturbing and weird
Caleb’s bottle-fed lamb from two years ago had a lovely little male lamb … and HATED it. She utterly loathed the sight of it, and was doing all she could to destroy it. (Quite violent).
Of course, you do sometimes get this with first lambers … it spaces them out to have brought forth this mess which then seems determined to eat them, or swallow them, or (rather) particularly personal parts of them.
Suckling isn’t always intuitive!
It normally takes about a day and a half. The ewe gets all sorts of special feeding and attention. Within 48 hours she has realised this isn’t going to kill her, the lamb starts to smell like her, and her reluctance to mother it fades.
Not this week. Not this ewe. This sheep is a natural born killer!
This sheep is a natural born killer
Now, we see all sorts of stuff that’s not nice in the course of a normal farming year. Normally you can step in and fix things. And normally it’s all ‘natural’ stuff anyway. But this experience has been profoundly disturbing.
A word from the eighth century BC
” … Zion ({God’s people} said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
the Lord has forgotten me.”
15 “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
16 See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.”
When life gets tough for us the temptation is there to assume it’s because God’s taken against us.
For Isaiah’s congregation things had developed that way, but the pledge of God’s love stands against the idea.
Love and unerring committment
God’s unchanging promise of loving committment to His covenant-loved people comes over clearly in the words of William Cowper’s old hymn:
Can a woman’s tender care
Cease towards the child she bear?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.
As the Book of Proverbs would put it:
“The name of the Lord is a fortified tower;
the righteous run to it and are safe.”
All the more reason to stay committed to Him, then, especially when our own life experience is particularly disturbing and weird?