Friday morning I got up at 5:30 as usual and started my day with the normal routine. When it was about 6:45 and the early spring light was just dawning, I pulled out of the garage and began down our cul-du-sac. The robins are arriving and the cardinal was calling from a nearby tree. It has been a terribly bitter cold winter, so the sense of spring in the air is more welcome than I have remembered for a long time. It has been a difficult winter in many ways. It has been emotionally draining for me, and there is some stored-up sorrow and even grief.
When I got to the end of our street, something caught my eye on the pavement in the road ahead. There was just a bit of movement. When I looked more closely, I realized what I was seeing. It broke my heart and it changed my day. There on the side of the road was a wild rabbit. It was dying from injuries it must have received from a passing car moments before. One of its hind legs was kicking meaninglessly in the air, even as it lay on its side in the cold morning gravel. I pulled over, torn between the urge to drive away and the inexplicable need to take in the heartbreaking sight.
In the 15 seconds it took me to get to the rabbit, it had stopped kicking, and it took its last breath while I watched. Its damaged body lay stretched out, almost gracefully. Its warm eyes were open, looking up toward a sky pink with sunrise.
I just stood there in my work clothes, my car running a few feet away. The praise music from my CD player could be heard along with the songs of the robins and the cardinal. I stared at the rabbit, so suddenly still, its fur wet.
I didn't know what to do.
The violence of this brutal ending seemed so out of place at the start of my routine day. I carried the warm body of the rabbit across the street to a clump of evergreen bushes, and laid it there below the protecting branches where the grass was just beginning to turn green.
I pulled back onto the road toward work and made it about a block before my vision was obscured by the tears.
I turned into the empty parking lot of the neighborhood elementary school. I put my head in my hands and I found myself crying harder than I had cried for a long time.
I didn't care. Something about the finality and irony of the early spring death of that solitary rabbit had snapped something deep within me. There was such a feeling of pain and brutality and unfairness. This little animal had somehow survived the most terrible winter in decades, with months of sub-zero winds and snowy desolation. It had managed bleak and dark days and hidden from untold dangers. Now, on this spring morning with the first sounds of birds, it had met its end beneath a roaring automobile just a few hours before the first warming breezes would transform Minnesota into something beautiful.
It was so brutal.
As I cried alone in the car I considered how it could be that God had created a living world through such harsh principles, referenced conveniently with phrases like 'survival of the fittest,' and 'the circle of life.' These phrases embody the very process of God's creation, but what a cruel process it is.
I found myself praying that heaven will be a place filled with every kind of plant and animal – that all the innocent living things, having joined with all creation in the redemption of Christ, will find themselves forever there in that place that is beyond time and beyond the fear of death.
It took me ten minutes to compose myself and continue to work. I was shaken. I shared the story several times during the morning, each time fighting back tears.
Why did it have to be a rabbit?
My heart has become attuned to rabbits since Kyle came into my life. A domestic lop house rabbit, Kyle was adopted 2 years earlier by my older daughter when she learned that he needed a new home. Kyle had lived with her for months in her Minneapolis apartment, until a dog adoption made Kyle homeless again. At that point he came to live with us.
That's when Kyle started training me.
Rabbits are prey animals related more to horses than to rodents like mice and rats. Rabbits are instinctively shy and difficult to befriend. Unlike dogs, with their predictable affection, rabbits are fickle, full of complex personality and full of surprises.
I never ever would have imagined how quickly I could become attached to a house rabbit.
Kyle is a dependable litter box user, allowing him to have free access to our entire finished basement during the day. He spends solitary hours patrolling and dozing in various of his favorite locations beneath chairs and on sofas. Kyle has trained me to a morning ritual that has re-written my personal devotional time with God. My prayer time is now spent lying on the carpet, Kyle snuggled in the crook of my arm, allowing his ears and head to be scratched. These quiet moments, me in prayer, Kyle with eyes closed, gently grinding his teeth in a bunny purr, start my days in peace. Inevitably my prayers include thanks for time with a small furry soul who offers such simple companionship.
After a few minutes of this quiet time, Kyle will cock his head, look at me, and then offer a contented thump with a big furry hind foot, and dash off to my office where he stands tall on his haunches until I provide a yogurt drop. Kyle is then free to run off and spend his solitary day, awaiting my return after work. In evenings when I am in my office or recline on the basement sofa to watch a TiVo recording or an NFL game, Kyle will inevitably appear and linger in the periphery of the room, entranced by the movements dancing on the TV screen. Lop rabbits are notoriously hard of hearing. It is not uncommon for Kyle to silently hop up onto the sofa for a quiet ear rub, his head pushed gently against my arm.
Kyle knows how to melt my heart. I guess it doesn't take that much.
For some reason I always think of Kyle as a tragic figure, though his life is the very story of redemption. He's been spared no expense. He is indulged to the extreme. In return he offers moments of dearest affection, punctuated by aloofness and suspicion. It is like having a tiny miniature horse in my finished basement.
Sensing the bond forming between Kyle and me, my older daughter was also the one to urge me to read Richard Adams' 1972 classic Watership Down. My tears at the death of the wild rabbit on our street echoed my weeping as I finished the last page of that beautiful book.
There is something about rabbits, their simplicity, their complexity, their unpredictability, their softness.
Though at 53 it is easier and shows more decorum to write about theology and science, I have decided that being genuine and transparent and honest also means writing about how heartbroken I am to experience the death of a wild rabbit on a spring day, and how it makes me dread the death of another rabbit.
And why I pray that there will be rabbits in heaven.
4.13.14
