5 minute read
Simple Times
BY SUZY McCRAY
MY CHRISTMAS ANIMAL
Once again I don’t quite fit the ideals of the Christmas or even the New Year’s Season. While others are decorating with lowing cattle, snow-white lambs, and docile-looking camels in their manger scenes, or bouncing (or flying) reindeer and sparkling polar bears surrounding Santa and Mrs. Claus around outdoor tinsel-draped trees, I’m thinking of a critter who hangs by his furry brown arms and legs in dense rain forests far south of our Alabama home.
While a visit to our barn on Christmas Eve always makes me think of the Nativity with its sweet-smelling hay and gentle hums and murmurings of the goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys, guineas, and years-ago rabbits, this year my Christmas animals have lengthy claws that sometimes make them almost look fierce. But they’re usually not.
As I reflect over the happenings of the past couple of years throughout the world and even closer in our rural Alabama home, I identify with an animal I don’t think I’ve ever seen in person unless it was long ago at the Birmingham Zoo. But I’ve seen them on videos and TV enough to understand what writer Xochitl Dixon was explaining in his July 14, 2022 devotion in the Our Daily Bread devotional books that we give away in our farm’s tiny general store.
He talked of sitting to rest near a zoo’s sloth exhibit where he observed a sloth hanging upside down and completely still.
While mulling over his own limitations caused by many months of health problems, he struggled with sitting still when he wished to be up and moving about as before his illnesses. But then he more closely started watching the slow-moving sloths.
An individual sloth stretched one arm and reached for a nearby branch. Stopped again and just hung there between the two limbs in his enclosure. It seemed almost an eternity till he stretched his other arm moving his body closer to the nearby limb.
Dixon then realized that being still required the utmost strength. To be content with moving ever-so-slowly required more than muscle-power. There had to be unusual strength to be at peace and content in the small enclosure as he moved deliberately from branch to branch. I thought about Dixon’s description of that slow-moving sloth many times since I read and reread that devotion last summer.
Readers of this column rejoiced with me five years ago as I entered a new season of my life when I turned 65. Not only had I faced and seemingly overcome drastic health challenges, but God also blessed me with a marriage to my eighth-grade sweetheart, more than 50 years later. I turned 70 in May and I’m not ashamed of my age at all! As a matter of fact, I’m quite proud of it!
Like so many others, during the past two years I have fought many additional health issues, some of which we had not even thought of and which had not even been discovered a little more than two years ago! Yet here I am!
There were times I couldn’t walk the approximate 60 feet from my home’s side door to our small general store/farm stand. And the 100-foot hike from the back of our house to our barn was out of the question.
Chicks were hatched, Turkey Tom moved into the pasture, and three unexpected ducklings moved in with the goats and other ducks. But I couldn’t feed or water them.
Not only did I have to depend on my husband Mack for my personal care, but also for the care of everything on this farm. For someone who had always boasted of their preparedness and self-reliance, this was all a hard pill for me to swallow.
For a while I didn’t realize that my kids and Mack were almost hand carrying 18-year-old Stormie-goat from the pasture into the safety of the barn every night. When he got down, he couldn’t get back up. He could go out in the mornings but his energy and strength failed him as the day wore on, I learned a little later. And oh how I could identify with Stormie’s feelings!
As time moved on, I was able finally to walk to the barn, visit with the barn cats and my beloved chickens and Turkey Tom, and was able to sit awhile inside with Stormie. I hand fed him a Pop Tart. Then held his head while he got a good drink of cool water. I rubbed between his rough horns and scratched all his usual itchy favorite spots. I told him I loved him and I understood he had to leave us. His wise old brown eyes looked directly into my blue ones.
The next morning when Mack went to the barn to feed, he said Stormie didn’t want anything to eat and lay comfortably in a bed of straw. By lunch time he had left us.
I began walking and moving about a little more each day and was soon making the goat milk soap and jellies my store required. But even now I can’t run to the pasture if I hear coyotes howling in the distance. I can’t bounce down the steps and hurry to my store when I hear the beeping in the house letting me know somebody has come for a baby quilt, or just to talk. But I CAN walk out there slowly with a big smile on my face knowing I’ve made good progress.
And that’s why a sloth is my favorite Christmas animal this year. I sometimes jokingly tell folks I’m moving at “sloth speed” this year. But it goes way farther than that!
I’ve realized that if I’m going to move at sloth speed, or even be as content as a sloth hanging still there from the branches, I had to depend on much more than muscle power. I needed God’s supernatural power to get me through!
When I have the physical and emotional strength to go through my days, I praise God for my health. But when there are days when I remember that I am each one of those 70 years old, I remember how God has always promised to watch over me. How in Psalm 91 it says “He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings, shalt thou trust!”
As I often struggle and want to do things “my way right now!” I remember the faithful sloth and how he measures each movement in peace and contentment.
So while you are celebrating Christmas and the optimism of the New Year, I’ll be over here resting under God’s wings and then contentedly moving at my sloth like pace!
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Luke 2:14.
