Monthly Devotional

Saved By a Lamb

May, 2007

"Let's go check to see if there are any new lambies," I said to my daughter Julia. In a muddy corner outside the barn we found a mother, and baby, and two other suspicious mounds stuck in the mud, which turned out to be muddy, wet lambs barely able to lift their heads. Although I didn’t expect them to survive, with my kindergartner’s help and hope, I began a futile rescue attempt.

Second grader Christine ran warm bath water as Julia and I put the lambs into the tub to raise their body temperature. The girls delighted in the slightest wiggles from their patients. I frowned and warned, "They are going to die.” Christine and Julia were naively hopeful and needed me to believe; but I remembered their disappointment with an earlier failed attempt. Julia had asked, “The lamb didn’t do anything wrong. Why did it have to die?”

Our patients soon turned the tub water muddy, so we drained it and started over. As the warm water ran over the chilled, limp lambs, we held their heads up so they wouldn’t drown.

After several minutes, I lifted the tiny boy lamb out of the tub and Christine began blow-drying him. The larger female lambie was in bad shape, too. “Mommy look, they are wiggling a little,” Julia said, as if she was a patient’s advocate. “But they will probably die,” I reminded my girls sadly.

The lambs were too weak to stand by their mother and nurse, and we didn’t have any powdered milk ewe replacer to bottle-feed them and so the girls insisted I go out and milk the Mom. I followed their directives and after I returned from my adventure, their patients sucked down the nourishment. My daughters giggled with glee and begged to take turns bottle-feeding.

When my husband Will came home from work, the girls bounded out of the family room, each holding a lamb and squealed, "SURPRISE!"

They saved the lambs. But SURPRISE, we were saved by a lamb. God chose a lamb as the animal of sacrifice and God chose His Son to be the perfect lamb, as t he sacrifice for our sins.

Copyright © 2007 - Ann Marie Stewart. All rights reserved.

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