Scared Rabbits

by Audrey Stallsmith

As I was watering plants one day, I heard our dog and the neighbor one hassling a twittering something. “Leave that bird alone!” I snapped at them, before realizing that the critter they were chasing actually was a very small rabbit.

At my yell, the dogs had backed off long enough for the bunny to run underneath a prickly juniper bush. So I dragged our mutt indoors and kept admonishing the other one through the window, in hopes that my distracting it would give the rabbit time to escape.

Although those furry creatures used to be the bane of us gardeners, the invasion of the coyotes has depleted their population so significantly that we hardly ever see them anymore. And I have to admit that we kind of miss them.  Not to mention that it would take a hard heart indeed to want a baby bunny to get caught. I had small hopes for this one, though, since we also have many cats in addition to the dogs. And any of them can move faster than I can.

I shortly had to leave for church and never found out whether the pursued made his escape or not. But the whole incident got me to thinking that life must be tough for the cottontails who seemingly have the whole world out to get them, including humans with guns as well as coyotes, foxes, dogs, cats, and assorted raptors.

Of course that doesn’t just apply to rabbits. Those of us who keep chickens usually have to lock them in from evening to sunup. We sometimes are required to devise more and more elaborate fortifications to keep their numerous nighttime predators out. Our task isn’t helped by the fact that poultry tend to fall into a somewhat torpid state when they go to roost and make easy pickings then. 

We sometimes feel like scared rabbits or chickens ourselves when we scroll through the scams that fill our inboxes and voice mail. Or when we receive constant warnings about all the bacteria, viruses, terrorists, and tricksters who are out to get us. Unfortunately, humans, rabbits, and chickens all are “born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7)

Under those circumstances, fear can be as paralyzing as that poultry passivity because it can have us trying to look in sixteen different directions at once—and afraid to move at all. On the other hand, we can get so disgusted with the whole thing that we start throwing all caution to the winds, as many young people appear to be doing now during the corona virus epidemic, endangering both ourselves and others in the process. Or we can let fear make us aggressive, which seems to be happening with both pro-mask and anti-mask people these days—the former afraid of the virus and the latter afraid of having their freedom taken away from them.

Since I didn’t have any problem giving up my freedom to drive on the left side of the road for the sake of my own safety and that of others, wearing a mask to visit a store doesn’t bother me much. But, unfortunately, aggressive fear can rise to irrational levels. 

Whenever we think we have too much of it these days, we might want to hark back to another century when that fear sparked a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore in 1861 while he was on his way to Washington D. C. for his inauguration. There was only one train from the north to the Capitol back then, and it passed straight through the increasingly hostile state of Maryland. 

At that time Lincoln had no intention of ending slavery in the south, just in the new states which were joining the Union. But the slave owners apparently didn’t believe that and whipped up their regions into a state of hysteria over his election—even claiming that Lincoln planned to subdue the south by allowing all of those freed slaves to take their vengeance on their former masters. 

Therefore, the members of a militia group in Maryland apparently thought they were justified in killing the newly elected president before he could take office. In fact, when they drew lots to decide who would commit the crime, they actually had the “red” lot fall to several people instead of one man, in case that one chickened out.    

Fortunately, the staunchly anti-slavery detective Allan Pinkerton got wind of the plot and smuggled the incoming President through Baltimore the night before Lincoln actually had been scheduled to arrive there. Pinkerton knew all the right people, including the head of the railroad who actually had hired him to investigate threats of sabotage. So he was able to ensure that telegraph service to Baltimore was temporarily disabled and that a certain train did not leave without him and his charge aboard. 

Still, the railroad car in which they were riding had to be unhitched and towed to the opposite side of town to be attached to another train, a time period which must have been nerve wracking to say the least. Since several other states had already seceded, we can imagine the chaos that would have ensued had the newly elected president actually been assassinated in Maryland when the nation was fracturing.  

By its drastic reaction to Lincoln’s election, the south actually hastened the emancipation of the slaves which it had so dreaded. But, as with most unlikely conspiracy theories, that supposedly government-sponsored massive uprising of the freed against their former masters never happened. 

I suspect Martin Luther King, Jr. later insisted on peaceful protests partly because he realized that fear is at the root of racism. And he knew that many whites in the south were still waiting for that uprising.

I’m also guessing that there was a good deal of suppressed guilt in the slave owners’ paranoia. Those who had sold their souls to the devil to get their cotton in probably didn’t fear death as much as they did the judgement which lay beyond it—when they would be called to account for how they had treated all their fellow men.

So how should we deal with our own fears, so we don’t become like my pet hen? This morning, when I released her from the cage which keeps her safe overnight, she hopped right back in. That doesn’t give her much of an actual life. 

First, we need to ask ourselves how likely the perceived threats against us are. Most of those “plots” you read about on Facebook are only the products of somebody’s overheated imagination or extreme exaggerations of the actual facts. And we all have enough to worry about already without wasting energy on the ludicrous. 

After we’ve done what we can to guard against the real threats, we need to keep in mind that even rabbits don’t stay in hiding all their lives despite all the odds against them. In fact, judging by the jaunty way they cock their ears and flick their tails, I suspect they often enjoy their contests with their pursuers.

Think of Lincoln, accompanied only by a single bodyguard, Pinkerton, and one of Pinkerton’s female operatives, riding calmly into the enemies’ stronghold in the dead of night.  There was a certain jaunty defiance in that--and a lesson to us that often the only way around fears is straight through them.

Like him, we should take what precautions we can for the sake of others as well as ourselves. Those others include our enemies, since Lincoln’s evasive action probably prevented some of them from becoming murderers. But we then have to leave the outcome up to God. If our souls are secure, we don’t need to fret about our physical safety. Granted, death may be painful, but it isn’t permanent. 

However, our souls are. So, whenever we are tempted to turn back from the narrow way, we also should remember the protestors who crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965, despite the police waiting for them on the other side with billyclubs. In their quest for voting rights, those unarmed marchers seemed to have everything against them that day. In fact, the bridge itself was named for a Confederate officer who later became a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

To we Christians, it often seems like the devil’s forces have all the advantages in this world too. But both Lincoln and those protestors knew that they had right on their side, so they just kept moving forward. 

If martyrdom was to be the outcome, scripture had informed them that it is the persecuted and not the persecutors who win in the end. And a life lived in fear is a life not worth living. It is, in fact, just another form of slavery.