The baby deer was neatly tucked into a bed of grass, nestled under the old reddish bench which sat in my parents’ front yard. It’s a wonder I even noticed it, bumbling out of the car with other things on my mind and many things in my hands.
But I did see it, shocked to a stop, car door still ajar.
My first instinct was to glance over my shoulder, worried that the mama deer was about to run me down. I was, inevitably, standing between her and her baby, a wilderness 101 no-no and a surefire way to get myself eaten or mauled or both. But then I realized I was thinking of bears and, anyway, I was in the driveway of my parents’ house. There were not a lot of critters of the mauling variety in the immediate vicinity.
The next stone my mind skipped was to worry about the baby deer itself, all white spots and big black eyes and browning fur. It was so small, barely moving. Was that a flutter of its eyelids? An upturning of its ears? A subtle inhale, exhale, inhale? Why was it here all alone? Had its mother abandoned it? Been hit by car? Been eaten by some ravenous predator?
And, importantly, what was my responsibility in this moment?
Well, first and foremost, I called my girls out of the house.
“Don’t get too close,” I said. “Don’t disturb her. We don’t want to touch her or bother her or anything that might mean her mommy won’t come back.”
“But how can we help her?” my eldest asked, putting to words what I’d been chewing on these last five minutes. “She’s all alone.”
“I think we just leave her,” I said finally. “She’ll be okay. I’m sure her mother will come back.”
But — and of course — I wasn’t sure of that at all. It would take just one roving dog, one descending hawk, one ambitious toddler, and that little deer was toast. But deer as a species have been successfully living for a much longer time than I have been. All I knew was to trust in the natural order of things — and to marvel at the scene before me.
There is a series of chapters from Isaiah with which I have been praying lately. Here is a small selection:
Who has measured with his palm the waters, marked off the heavens with a span, held in his fingers the dust of the earth, weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? … Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is God from of old, creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, and his knowledge is beyond scrutiny. (Is 40: 12, 28)
There are countless other verses from Scripture that speak to the vastness of God and God’s creation, that remind us that God’s Spirit is unfolding in all things and always has been. At times, lines such as these may feel like cold comfort: God appears too remote to care about my trifles and troubles. God has bigger things to worry about.
But then I think back to that baby deer. By the afternoon, that little critter stumbled to its feet and awkwardly wandered beyond the tree line behind the house to find its mom. The mother deer, tapping into an ancient instinct, had left its baby behind to protect it. The scent of a full-grown deer, I learned, attracts predators; a newborn deer has neither a scent to attract predators nor the coordination to escape should a predator discover it. Being left under the bench in our front yard, vulnerable and alone, was necessary if it was to stay alive.
To my eyes, that looked foolish, dangerous and reckless. And indeed, the act was not without risk. But my eyes aren’t God’s eyes; I can see only what sits before me. Had I acted rashly on my assumptions — called animal control or tried to move the baby deer or some other such thing — I would have derailed what God had quite literally put in place ages earlier.
Our eyes cannot always see clearly and immediately how God is at work in a particular moment. And yet, God is there; God is here. The vastness of God does not mean that our specificity gets subsumed. Rather, in God’s time, our story unfurls. Not without peril, not without risk. But with the certainty that God has placed in our stories something necessary, something that is worth the risk, the peril, the awkward stumbling upon wobbly legs, the slow, unsteady traipsing toward the forest, toward adventure, an effort — uncertain but worthy — to share something of our God with the wider world for as long as we have to do so.
