Little Bambi wobbled into my next-door neighbor’s yard. Left by her mother to fend for herself, she spent an entire day by a huge sycamore tree near our busy road. When I discovered Bambi, I noticed that one of her scrawny little two-week-old legs had been injured. She had trouble walking. Holly, who had just driven by, stopped her car, got out, and called everyone that she knew, trying to enlist help from her animal-rescue- trained friends. As my deer-loving, fatherly-instincts kicked in, I positioned myself between Bambi and the traffic, wanting to protect her.
Feeding Bambi greens from the lawn took me back to my early childhood, great memories when my grandpa used to take me to North Park in Pittsburgh to feed the deer.
My neighbors from across the street, Dawn and Michael, came over to help. Dawn called my neighbor, Buddy, who coached them through the process of getting a towel, wrapping Bambi, picking her up, and bringing her to Buddy so that he could take her to the animal rescue shelter to be cared for. My friend Cynthia captured Bambi on film, but the true story that I’m writing today is unfinished. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Bambi.
Bambi represents the lost, abandoned, and broken ones that we find along life’s busy roads. When people and animals get broken, they’re frequently discarded by their “friends” and “loved ones.” When the Bambis of your life don’t behave or turn out the way that you expected, what do you do with them? Are they out by someone’s curb, like Bambi, looking for shelter, food, and someone to love them?
God loves the Bambis of our world. We’re all like lost sheep who have gone astray. We’re waiting for someone to welcome us in. We’re longing for someone to notice us and to give us a chance to belong and to become part of a caring family. It’s only when we’ve given up hope in everything that this world has to offer that we become open to Jesus to save, rescue, heal, and restore us. How I thank God for sending Bambi to bring our neighbors together. But how quickly we go back into our own homes and live disconnected lives. We can become so lost and lonely and afraid to connect with the very people who live and work nearby us whom Jesus died for.
How I thank God for sending His Son, Jesus, into this world to teach us how to live and how to love and how to give our lives for the lost ones that He came to seek and to save. Jesus went after me when I was a lost, young boy and orchestrated me repenting of my sins and being restored to God. Forty-six years later, Jesus still relentlessly pursues me each day with His love, orchestrating opportunities to notice, discover, and build relationships with His lost loved ones who need His love expressed in tangible ways.
If we’re truly becoming more like Jesus, we’ll be criticized by religious people and the crowd for stopping to care for one who has been beaten up or beaten down by cruel people. We’ll be criticized by our own people-groups because we leave them to go to the homes of notorious sinners who are searching for Jesus but who are too short, too confused, too poor, too rich, too young, too old, too broken, or “too” something else for people to associate with them. If we can’t identify and relate with the broken Bambi’s around us and if we don’t have room in our hearts and homes for them, how can we say that we love Jesus?
Lord, break our hearts for the things that break Your heart. Daily intersect our lives with broken people who need You. Remove everything from our lives that get in the way of representing You well when we encounter the lost and broken ones in our community. Help us to seek and to save the lost and to hold nothing back. For Your honor and for Your glory. I pray in Jesus’ Name. Amen.
discarded that need your love?