A Fawn Set Free

A Fawn Set Free

"Naphtali is a deer let loose..." Gen. 49:21

         "All I ever wanted was to live in a house filled with peace and love," Neb reflected to himself. He often relaxed at the florida room table in the late afternoon with a cup of coffee, collecting his thoughts. Mottled sunlight filtered deep into the room through the magnolia and pin oak trees just outside the window, as the afternoon slowly transformed into evening.
         Neb and Elizabeth liked to call this room the "gathering room", a closed-in porch with tongue-in-groove paneling painted white, almost a story above the sloping lawn. With a beckoning bookshelf built into the wall, two wide stoops leading into the interior of the house, and a tropical fish tank as the center of attention, everyone who entered this room could sense a place of familiarity and rest.
         As soon as Neb walked in the door with the realtor, six months ago, he knew this comfortable fifty-year-old house would be a place of quiet healing. So he bought the house for Elizabeth even before she had a chance to see it.
         Of course she loved it immediately. They knew God had drawn them to this settled neighborhood. Three attempts to buy a house in their former town several hundred miles away had all fallen through. Besides, her Mother lived close by, and Elizabeth fondly remembered the good times from her childhood growing up in this part of southern Alabama.
         Neb could accept the reality of things as they were, as he knew God surely does. But it was not always so. Neb's mind settled back over the dark and painful paths he had traversed. Rivers of memories came flooding back.
         Twenty-six years of bitter fighting in a previous marriage had left seemingly irreversible scars on Neb--broken health, migraines, depression, and a recurring losing battle with alcoholism. He knew early on in that marriage that it would not be a good one; that it would only end in pain and regret. "If you think I'm ever going to stop fighting, I can't promise you that, but you made a commitment to stay," she once spat at him. Taunting more, "If you're going to leave, you might as well go ahead and go."
         Neb remembered the numbing emptiness at that point in his life, no feeling at all, commitment or not. There was no fight left in him. He knew he must get out.
         "If there is no hope of joy, there is no hope at all," he once wrote in his journal. "Could God hear my pleas for help?" he often wondered. Then came the unexpected anwer.
         Taking a moment to savor his coffee, Neb relived the circumstances of that hot July day, the day the answer came. It all started with a fairly routine service call for his piano service business.
         He was on his way to a client's house out in the far end of the county at the end of a tiring day. No one had appeared at the door that morning, so Neb called ahead and made arrangements to come back again for his last appointment of the day. This time as he rounded a fenced cornfield off to his right, he slowed, remembering the hidden curve just before his customer's house. Easing around the bend, he met a large doe standing still in the middle of the road, looking back toward the cornfield over her shoulder.
         Neb drifted to a stop twenty yards away, and whispered to the worried deer, "Take your time, I'll wait for your baby to get across the road too."
         What he saw sent a bolt of shock mixed with compassion through him. The doe had neatly cleared the cattle-wire fence, but the fawn could not jump as high. There she hung upside-down with both hind legs hopelessly tangled in the upper rows of wire. He threw the shift lever of his aging Volvo sedan into park and ran over to her.
         Struggling against the fence, Neb failed to free her. Her bleeding legs and cries for help reminded him of an injured child. The scene tore his heart in two. "Hang on, I'll get you out," he reassured her.
         Running back to his trunk, Neb pulled from his tool kit a pair of wire cutters. Almost in tears he quickly cut at the fence. The fawn quietly slumped to the ground on the other side, surely dead from shock, he thought.
         Reaching through the fence he gently touched her on the flanks to see if she were still breathing. He could see the distinct outline of her spots on her velvety hide; smell her warm fur.
         In the flash of an instant, the fawn bounded up and disappeared back into the cornfield. She was all right! Her mother had already slipped on across the road barely out of sight to await the fate of her dearly loved offspring.
         The moment was not lost on Neb. As an experienced outdoorsman he had spent hours and even days in the woods--backpacking, logging, working around farms. Yet he had never fallen upon an experience like this.
         Filled with emotion for the first time in years, he turned to make his way back to his car through the tall dry grass. The providential timing of it all, as heavy as the steel-blue sky, stopped him short. Neb felt strangely happy for the deer, but sad for himself. "When will I be free?" he cried out loud through the gathering clouds to God, his Maker. "Who will set me free?"
         Three weeks later, Neb ended his own futile struggling against unforgiving fetters, and entrusted his fate to Someone greater than himself. On a stifling August Sunday afternoon, he moved out on his own.
         Neb took a deep breath, shook off the weight of all that he remembered, and reached for his coffee. Elizabeth brought him another half-cup and sat down beside him, her flowing auburn hair glowing like that of a gold angel in the warm evening sunlight.
         "Know what I like best about this house?" Neb teased. Ever since they moved in, they only allowed each other one "best thing" at a time, there was so much.
         "What?" she went along.
         "Every corner of every room is filled with peace and love," Neb offered. Elizabeth smiled and slipped her comforting arms around her husband's shoulders.