Two Legs And A Piece Of An Ear

The coyotes were thick that year. Paw prints around the chicken coop and their howls sounding just beyond the edges of the porch light were constant reminders that they were on the prowl, waiting for their next chance to kill. It was spring. With young pups in their dens, mamas were lean and hungry. Their normal reserve was wearing thin, and they were willing to take risks that ran contrary to their timid nature. We should have known it was only a matter of time before one of the cows would become vulnerable as they began dropping that year’s calves.

But the coyotes weren’t the only mamas lean and hungry. I was in my second year of seminary. Every week I spent nineteen hours on the road, to and from class. I juggled Greek and Hebrew vocabulary and grammar, the needs of my children, the obligations that came with living on the family farm, and the constant strain of simply trying to survive.

The first semester of grad school, I had tried working until my body rebelled. It seemed that I wasn’t super woman after all, and twenty hours of work combined with fifteen hours of class, homeschooling, that massive commute, and various other needs that had to be tended were more than I could take. Not that I would admit that. In my mind, failure just meant that I hadn’t tried hard enough, and I was livid when I was forced to “self-terminate” my job. Officially the paper work states it was due to lack of availability to work. The truth was I was terminated due to my lack of availability to the womanizing manager, thus beginning a downward spiral into student loan debt, but even then money was virtually nonexistent.

I could write a novel on the obstacles I had faced just trying to get by. My love life was a shambles. The church I attended underwent a major shift that led to me leaving, and not on good terms. I was living on cigarettes and coffee. Five hours of unbroken sleep was a luxury, and I was having to work double time to keep up with my classmates whose previous degrees had prepared them for the classes we now took. Even the most common terms tossed about by my profs were foreign to me, and I was looking up almost everything they said so I could understand the lectures – Reform Theology, Liberation Theology, documentary criticism, redaction, pericopes, types and shadows, all of it left me wondering if I really belonged here. My fellow students seemed to know I didn’t belong there and only a few were willing to be more than polite, and few weren’t even willing to do that.

Emotionally, mentally, and even in this place where one would expect to be fed spiritually, I was that the end of my rope. Don’t get me wrong. God provided in ways that defy explanation, but sometimes it is hard to see him at work when your world is crashing down around you.

“As a shepherd recuses from the mouth of the lion two legs or a piece of an ear, so shall the people of Israel who dwell in Samaria be rescued.” Amos 3:12

These words roused me from the open-eyed nap I had perfected for chapel, and I briefly tuned in to hear the rest of the speaker’s sermon. “Why in the world would anyone bother to save two legs and a piece of an ear?” I wondered, and then my sleep deprived mind turned grouchy. “You’d better hurry up,” I mentally told God, “or that’s going to be all that is left of me. And what good is that going to do you?”

That night after the kids were asleep, I sat on the front porch and dined on ramen noodles and steak sauce, and considered dropping out. What type of mother was I being to my children? How could I possibly get through this when I was constantly so lost on my assignments? Maybe I was never meant to fit in with all the people who had really been called to be in seminary, and I needed to come to grips with the fact that my pride had led me into an impossible situation. The coyotes screamed in the darkness, and on impulse I screamed back hoping to scare them away. Instead, they joined me filling the night with their song until it seemed as if everything dark and black hid hundreds of their kind. I laughed, wasn’t this how it always goes? Stand your ground only to learn that the enemy has you out numbered and surrounded?

The next day, one of the cows limped to the barn. That she had calved was obvious, but the baby was nowhere to be seen. I pulled on my boots and began searching the forty acres. In the far back corner, I found what the coyotes had left.

Two legs and a piece of an ear.

People claim that God doesn’t talk to us these days, but he spoke to on that one. I didn’t need words. It was spelled out in blood before me. Was my God any less loving or caring than me? Was he any less compassionate towards me than I was for this animal? And if I trudged through the heavy grass, to find what was hidden from me, would the God who saw everything miss my struggles? Here I was examining the aftermath of a vicious attack, but he swore to be there to reclaim what was his even from the mouth of the lion. Not to simply view the remains after the enemy had left.

In Exodus 22, we are told that if man gives livestock to another for safekeeping, and it is torn to bits that that the caretaker should gather the remains, and hand it over as proof that he was not a thief. As I walked away from the bloody bits of the calf wishing I could have done more and being confronted with the fact that I could not, I realized that while I had done all I could in the natural, I still had a job to do in the spiritual. I was not a thief. I had not neglected the gifts that had been given over to my care. My life may have been shredded by the teeth of an enemy who roams about like a lion seeking who he could devour, but I was still responsible to get those pieces back to the rightful owner. So that day, I gathered up the remains of my life and presented them to God.

I realized that in keeping those bits of my ravaged hopes and dreams, I was condemning myself as a thief. I was hanging onto what did not belong to me, and hiding the evidence of my own innocence in their demise. And I think this is where most of us miss a step. We see the death, and we see the gore, and so we walk away without completing the task set before us.

Some of us need to go back to the far corner of that field in our lives where our dreams died, we need to pick up the scattered pieces, and return them to the One who gave us that dream. They belong to him, not us, and we need to finish what we started. Walking away, leaving the remains on the ground, shouldn’t be an option. For as we march to God’s throne to offer up even these fragments, we are walking in defiance of our enemy, and bearing witness to the world of our God’s goodness and mercy. We are rejecting the lies of the one who devours, proclaiming that he does not have the final word, he does not get to define our reality, and we will not be branded a thief based on his actions. We are affirming that God sees through it all, he knows who bears the blame, and that we can trust him in our brokenness.

So get to walking, look for those pieces. Stop bearing the guilt that belongs to the one who destroys. Don’t entertain the shame for the deeds of the one who kills. Move in faith towards the King who surrounds us with love, and who never saw death – even the death of dreams – as final. Then stand back and watch what he can do with two legs and a piece of an ear.