Safe and sound

I jumped awake and sat straight up in bed. “Oh good,” I thought, “she’s here.”

Pippy was fast asleep at the end of my bed but just moments before she had been stuck down a rabbit hole. Or at least that’s where I saw her last during a dream that was more terror than fantasy. In my dream Pippy, leash-less on a walk through a meadow scene had discovered an open rabbit hold. In an Alice in Wonderland moment she slipped beneath the earth’s surface, the hole closed up and Pippy had disappeared. That dream seemed to last forever as I dug into the dirt, trying to reopen the hole and save my precious pet.

I’m not sure if Pippy barked in my dream or how I followed her movements below the earth but the next scene I remember is another rabbit hole opening and Pippy’s gray, dirt stained snout sticking up from below the surface, the hole too small for her to fit through yet large enough for me to see her desperate face.

That’s when I woke up. And there she was, alive and well.

Sometimes I wish that the critical, desperate moments in my life were all just a bad dream, like Pippy’s nightmare of an adventure, and that I would wake up to a soft bed and an hour left to sleep. But reality unfolds much differently than dream land. I end up in rabbit holes that seem endless, like I am trapped in the dark, uncertain of which way to go next.

Thankfully, God sees me and has my path established. In miraculous, marvelous ways He leads me out of the darkness and into His glorious light. Even when I cannot see a way forward and cannot comprehend how I will ever escape the confinement of the rabbit trail, God has already dug out the hole that will lead to my freedom.

In the end I know I will end up just like Pippy, safe and sound at the foot of Christ’s cross.