We hadn’t driven our second car for about two weeks when Jack went out to start it up and drive it to an errand. He had trouble starting it, so he lifted the hood and to his astonishment found a messy nest of leaves and a young possum staring at him and hissing. Jack came into the house to get some heavy gloves and I went back with him to see the intruder and marvel that it had built the nest and moved into the front of our car without our ever noticing. Our neighbors were outside, and came to marvel with us. It caused a minor sensation.

Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground. . . they are given into your hands. (Genesis 9: 1-2)This was the moment when God changed Noah’s relationship with the very animals that he had saved from the flood. The utter fear of mankind would reign in wild animals from then on.

When I stared at that little possum, I regretted that we couldn’t be friends. He had sought refuge in our car, and we were going to have to turn him out.

Every year I begin the first of January with reading the first chapters of the Bible. Strange as it might seem, I feel real renewal in returning to those scriptures, maybe because they address the basic circumstances of life on Earth, and the inescapable perception of the presence of God in all of nature. When God gives His gift of the rainbow to Noah, God makes sure that this is actually a covenant gift to all living things on the planet. It applies to all animals, as well as plants, that never again shall God destroy the whole world with a flood.

The early Genesis chapters are the beginning of the unveiling of God’s own character, His desires and intentions for His creation, and His massive creative capacity. Every part of it echoes throughout the Bible, as well as in my mind when I looked under the hood of our car at a terrified possum protecting “his” property. I alone knew that we were both His property.

Love in Him,

Prue