I promised some of you recently that I had a deep post in waiting, and I gave some others of you a snapshot of this thought. Here is the actual story as written by Erwin McManus in his book “Soul Cravings”
After a decade in LA, things finally came together for us to buy a house. During our first spring, a pair of mallards adopted us. They evidently thought our pool was a lake or really more like a pond or a puddle. In any case, they chose to make it their spring home. Next thing we knew they had laid a nest full of eggs. To our surprise, we woke up one day to nealry a dozen baby mallards swimming in our pool. The male mallard was there every day until the chicks were hatched. Once they were born, he flew the coop…
We’ve never been good with pets, We’ve pretty much tried them all. They would always seem to run away. This time, the exact opposite happened; we couldn’t get rid of them. So they took over our backyard, and we were the reluctant managers of a wilderness camp.We gave them full run of the pool and the backyard. We expected to enjoy the experience of watching them grow up and then one day fly away.
Little did we know that we were about to enter into our own personal nightmare. One by one we watched those little ducklings being hunted and elminated. From cats to skunks to crows, our backyard was open for duck season. We did everything we could to save their lives. We watched the female mallard face one sleepless night after another. Once I even had the misfortune of watching a crow swoop down , grab a duckling and fly away as its mother pursued to no avail. It was more than I could bear. I had moved to the city to avoid violence like this. I soon found myself having nightmares. All I could think about was how to save the remaining ducklings. I would spend time in the backyard trying to keep the crows away. Every couple of days I would discover another one had disappeared.
One evening I woke in up in the middle of the night breathing heavily, my heart pounding against my chest. I found myself leaping out of bed, shouting “did you hear the quack?”… As I lay there in bed, haunted by what I knew were the implications if the sounds I had heard, I found myself having an entirely different conversation.
God crashed into my brain and allowed me to see something- no, more accurately, to feel something, from his perspective. I know it was just inside my head, but it was as if I could hear God screaming
” Do you know how you feel about that duckling? The anguish that you’re feeling this moment, that’s how I feel for every human being who walks the face of this earth. If you could care about people the way you’re caring about that mallard this moment, it would make you a different person. You would know the heart of God.”
This world is full of crows, mallards, ducklings. There are crows who swoop down on helpless children in Thailand and turn them into child prostitutes… there are crows in the priesthood who hide behind their collars while they abuse children… ”
This passage really stirred the pastor heart in me. We are fighting against an enemy who wants to destroy life, rob our youth of hope, and take as many as he can away from the Father who loves them. And it is not people we are fighting against, it is not just the choices our youth and children are making. They have their own free will and choices, this is God given. They don’t always make good choices, but who does? The real game though is in the spiritual, where we NEED to fight for those whom God thinks are valuable enough to send his only son. Their price tag is the blood of Jesus; that is the worth of God’s kids.
It’s a time where it is very easy to feel disappointed in ministry (whatever ministry you are in), and feel like we are fighting a losing battle against sex, drugs and whatever else is luring us in. I am encouraged that God is fighting for his kids, he loves them and desperately longs for them to run to him for protection and life. And I am encouraged to keep fighting too.
