Saving Our Children Part 2

Late in the afternoon, on a trip out to investigate the struggling gosling’s predicament, I found several of my neighbors trying to intervene.

The one man in the group was down near the goose family, trying to approach the little one. But each time he drew near, the parents launched a full, wing-flapping attack. They were doing all in their power to protect their baby.

Then the man’s wife drew the family away by luring the other four siblings with bread crumbs. The parents followed to protect the four of them from this new “danger.” With the goose family diverted in the opposite direction, the man knelt over the one that had our concern. What the rest of us could not see —or the geese understand— was that there was a nearly invisible trap holding the little one down from which he could not escape, nor his parents free him. The man called out that the gosling was trapped in a transparent plastic mesh and declared he would need scissors to free the gosling. My house was the nearest, so I quickly obliged. In short, with the parent geese out of the way and the right tool, the man was able to cut the shackles that bound the little one. Within a few minutes, he had freed the little gosling and placed him upright on his feet to everyone’s relief and sheer delight. There are many times in life when our children —whether toddlers, teens, or adults— through carelessness, recklessness, or just ignorance get themselves ensnarled in the entrapments of sin. Most parents give their all to rescue their children and free them from danger. But, as with the geese, we often just don’t have what it takes to achieve the rescue. On numerous occasions, many of us have experienced the anguish of helplessness that results from our human frailties.

It is then we have had to be reminded that we needed a man to intervene; no, not their earthly fathers but the man Christ Jesus, the only One who can help in such times. Take a lesson from the geese. Let us not hamper His rescue efforts by our insistence on hovering in the way. Remember, we cannot save our children under any circumstances. Only He who shed His innocent blood and died on the cross for them can save them, and He has promised to do so. I claim that promise today.

Ella Louise Smith Simmons