Life is So Precious
Life is so precious—all life is so precious. Days later I can still see it’s beautiful medium brown, face and huge brown eyes. It lay prone with a mortal injury. A small deer, a beautiful small deer, lay bleeding profusely just outside the department store. Apparently confused and panicky it ran headlong through a plate glass door into a shopping mall. Badly cut and bleeding it did the only thing an animal knows to do—it ran. It ran blindly through the store aisles until loss of blood took its toll and the deer collapsed.
When we saw it, it was down, trussed my mall maintenance men to keep it from continuing to try to run. It looked straight ahead, probably in shock, likely no longer feeling pain nor panic. Still, my heart cries out in sadness knowing that its survival is doubtful.
Is there such a thing as an animal emergency medical team? Perhaps a nearby vet could be summoned, but probably not through 911, the emergency call number in the US. No, it’s more likely that the little fellow was going to bleed to death.
There were many long faces nearby. Even the grizzled maintenance men seemed touched and helpless to do anything but provide comfort, which they did. I was deeply touched by seeing this beautiful creature’s fate. The love I feel for it is so strong, so sad, so helpless to do anything but grieve. So I grieve. And I write, because that helps me work through the grief.
What message is God sending through this event? Why did the circumstances of my routine, pre-Christmas shopping day take me to the place and time where I witnessed this beautiful creature’s demise? I don’t believe in luck—good or bad luck. I don’t believe in coincidence. I believe all of life’s experiences are part of a complex fabric of opportunities to experience, to learn, and to grow.
What am I to make of this experience? Was I becoming insensitive to the miracle of life, taking it for granted? Had I been focusing so much on day-to-day problems of living that I had forgotten what is really important in life? Or was I just a minor observer of an experience created for another? I don’t know. Perhaps at some time the wisdom of retrospect will show me why this occurred.
I do know the experience burned deep within me the entire day. I felt a melancholy pain, love, and gratitude for the little creature who so deeply impacted me on this day. Finishing this several days later, these feelings return.
I’ve never hunted, nor can I understand the “sport” of killing a wild creature doing no harm. The satisfaction others get from hunting is simply beyond my ability to understand.
Why am I writing this? I don’t know for sure, but it helps me to understand my feelings to write about them. So I do.