Chavs or Foxes ...

I’ve been calling them hanging chavs, but in the back of my mind has been the word ‘foxes’. Yes. This morning I found it in Song of Songs. ‘Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.’ (2:15). In the paraphrase The Message, ‘Then you must protect me from the foxes, foxes on the prowl, foxes who would like nothing better than to get into our flowering garden.’

Chavs or foxes, it’s obviously not a modern problem. Nuisances which can distract and undermine joy and love and life. I had some success with ejecting one little fox yesterday, only to be met with another slightly bigger one this morning when this laptop froze. A help forum and a husband later, and I am back in business and that pesky fox is outta here.

This is the day the Lord has made. As it happens, it is the day the French celebrate Bastille Day, the day of liberation of political prisoners from the dreaded jail in Paris at the start of the French Revolution. It is also the day when, thirty years ago, my dear sister Judy was liberated from her disease-wracked body and went home to Jesus. It was incredibly fitting since Judy was a Francophile and loved everything French. I miss her still, maybe more poignantly in recent years as I walk our ageing mother home, on my own. 

Her death was a disaster to me and could have been a huge marauding fox in my spiritual garden. But the Lord caught that fox and through the pain has drawn me closer to himself. 

So, this is the day the Lord has made, and through the tears I see the rainbow, and give thanks to Jesus for his faithfulness as he has used that fox to take me deeper into him. Still through the tears, though.