Unshackled Moments ~ June 23 ~ The Lights of Home

Yesterday I sat down at a counter and drank a couple of cups of coffee with a cowboy friend of mine. He began telling stories, as he often does, and one struck me as containing more truth than history. One afternoon he took his young daughter to the field with him a few miles from home to work one of the horses he was training. He hitched that horse up to his little pickup truck and gave the gelding a galloping workout. He led the horse into some bottoms and promptly got stuck. He tried everything that he could think of to get the truck free of the mud, but nothing worked.

They had to walk out. My friend put his daughter up on the back of that horse and began to head across the fields, through the mud, to the home. The hour grew late. The sun set, and the coyotes began to howl. Now, the little girl had nothing to hold onto from her bareback seat on the horse except for his mane, and he was sidestepping and acting up a little, fighting the lead rope and causing the cowboy some serious frustration as he tried to get his daughter to the house, keep the horse under lead and not slip and fall in the mud. The ruckus of the horse and the situation didn't seem to faze or scare his daughter any. In fact, she would've enjoyed the ride had it not been for the coyotes' serenade.

Their song scared her. She felt sure they were going to catch her and her father before they reached home and eat them. Finally, they topped a hill and looked down on their house in the distance with its security light shining brightly. The moment she saw that light she said, "We;re saved." At this point in the tale, my friend chuckled and  talked some more about how she'd been afraid of the coyotes, but I missed some of what he said.

I was thinking. How often in life we are like my friend's little girl. Life gets dark and scary. Some of the things that scare us should because they are a true threat, and some are not as threatening as they seem. Still, our fears are real, and even though we are heading home and  our Father, who by the way is not scared for us at all, is right there with us, we can't quit staring out into the dark, watching the shadows become monsters and listening to every cry and croak in the dark as though they were a signal of the encroaching enemy. But though we still haven't made it home, and the truth is that the danger or lack of it remains about the same, from time to time we top a hill and get a glimpse of the lights of home.

That makes all the difference. The fear is dissipated. We realize and remember that we are saved and that nothing that comes against us can kill or defeat us. The darkness will not prevail. Our Redeemer lives and is mighty to save. He's the light of home in the darkest night on the hardest and scariest trail. Today if fear sings its coyote song in our ear, let us ask our Daddy to give us a glimpse of home, so that we can relax and and rejoice in the anticipation of what is to come.