Fierce love for family

My son had a frightening experience the other night in his home. His alarm system was not on; however it monitors doors when they open. As he was preparing to go to bed, the alarm indicated that someone had entered his home. He got his pistol and crept to the hall at the top of the stairs and saw a nasty looking man downstairs walking inside his house. Imagine seeing someone inside your home like that. As it turned out, the intruder wanted no part of that 44 magnum pistol and the situation turned out fine. Neither he nor his family got harmed by the intruder, aside from getting the daylights scared out of them.

That 44 magnum pistol reminded me of a time I was scared half silly. One time I was hunting wild hogs, (at night). It is dangerous to hunt them at night as they will charge a light when they see it, but a farmer had offered us good money to kill this huge boar that was ravaging his crops. Shortly after dark we released our bulldogs into the corn field and sure enough the big boar was out there eating his fill. Our dogs cornered the big mean boar and were fighting with him. A friend of mine and I went in to try and get a shot. My son was behind me and my hunting partner had a guy behind him. As we moved closer down the trail to where we heard the dogs fighting and the boar grunting to try and get a shot, suddenly I heard my friend yell, “Look out, here he comes!”, and before I could even move, the boar charged us and knocked both me and my buddy down. I flew through the air about ten feet and landed hard on my back and my flashlight went out upon impact. My son who was about 14 years old at the time had been behind me following me down the trail when the boar charged me and knocked me down. As I struggled to get up, I was in the pitch black dark with a 44 magnum pistol in one hand and frantically shaking my light in the other trying to make it come back on where I could see in the total darkness; all of the time wondering if the boar had hit my son and/or if he was going to attack me at any moment. Boars have razor sharp teeth and can kill a dog in minutes and they have no fear of humans whatsoever and could do the same to humans. It is hard to put into words the fear that I felt for my son at that moment.

Fortunately the boar had gone out into the cornfield and the dogs followed him out into the field and we could hear that they were fighting him again out in the middle of the field. I yelled for my son and I heard him answer from afar that he was all right. I later learned that in addition to my buddy and I getting knocked down by the hog, the guy following my buddy tried to jump over the hog and the boar hit him on the leg, but fortunately it just cut a hole in his blue jeans and did not cut his leg. My son is the only one of the four of us who escaped harm; he was tall and lanky with long legs and when he heard us shout, “Watch out here he comes”, he used those long legs to run like a Gazelle down the road to escape. We went into the field and shot the hog and the danger was over. (I have a mounted rug of that 350 lb. big old mean boar and now I can walk on his back for the rest of my life as retribution for knocking me down and scaring me silly.)

The fear that I felt for my son that day was similar to the fear that my son felt for his own family as he stood there holding a pistol on the intruder the other night. There is no doubt in my mind that we would have defended our children with our very lives if necessary. Imagine how God must have felt as He watched those Roman soldiers come seize Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. How hard it must have been for Him not to intercede for His perfect and innocent Son. Jesus went willingly to face a horrible death and His all-powerful Father who could have had ten thousand angels protect Him with the nod of His head stood by and allowed it in order that you and I might be saved. I cannot imagine watching my son go to his death and not intercede frankly. Apparently there was no other way for God to reconcile with us and he was willing to do so because He loves us that much! God’s love simply is not understandable nor is grace. I do love Him for it…with all of my heart!

1 John 4:19
We love Him because He
first loved us.