by Eileen Norman

Created on: August 04, 2010

                                               God’s Law: Our Incubator

When I was young, law in general seemed to me to be harsh and impersonal, even claustrophobic.  It seemed designed to trip us up, to deny our uniqueness and squash creativity. I could not identify law with love.  One day in my thirties, as I was cleaning house, I prayed for understanding, for a way to reconcile the seeming conflict between love and law.

As I prayed, I heard a disturbance at my front door.  When I opened it, I discovered Penny, our German Shepherd, with a large bird in her mouth.  She dropped the bird on the doorstep, where it flopped helplessly.  It seemed to have a broken wing.  I couldn’t very well just leave it there, so I brought it in and placed it in a nest of soft rags in a cake tin. I put this on the stove-top near a gently steaming kettle.  It seemed the thing to do for shock and to keep it from thrashing about and hurting it’s broken wing.  It was sort of an incubator.

The bird simply refused to stay put.  It threw itself out of the nest and onto the floor.  I finally wrapped a dish towel around it to keep its broken wing in place and held it in my lap.  It still thrashed about and eventually, it died.

I was very sad and thought what a shame it was that it couldn’t trust me and accept the limits of the incubator until it was healed and strong enough to fly.

A moment later, I made the connection between my prayer for understanding and the bird.  Suddenly, inside the boundaries of the law seemed a safe place to grow strong , not an arbitrary thwarting of our creativity or desire to fly.  By the very nature of our humanity, we are incomplete and vulnerable and almost always wounded by coming helpless into an imperfect world of imperfect people.  Spiritual maturity lags far behind our physical growth and the ability to make wise choices out of love often comes pretty late in life.

Our God gave us the safe incubator of His law, so that we can grow strong and loving and free without destroying or crippling ourselves or others. 

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