Running from Monday

by Lea Sims

  “When she got here, I put her under and completely cleaned her abscess. For the next week or so, I kept her as sedated as safely possible so she could heal, and then we transferred her to this enclosure. She’s been in this habitat healing and putting on weight, but this is the longest we’ve ever had a wolf in a solitary enclosure. What has been the greatest challenge with Sasha is getting her to trust anyone.”

  “I bet,” Delaney said, listening intently to his story.

  “She was pretty resistant to anyone coming into this enclosure in the beginning, including another wolf. She was very withdrawn and had pretty much isolated herself down in that den and rarely came out. John and I could get in here to put food out for her without much problem as long as we didn’t go anywhere near the den or try to engage her. But when I approached her den to see how she was healing, she would come out growling with teeth bared. She did the same thing when we tried to introduce any male wolves in here. Typically, when we get a new wolf, we put them in this solitary habitat and assimilate them slowly by bringing a wolf of the opposite sex and higher pack position—usually an alpha—into the enclosure. If that animal accepts the new wolf, then we can eventually move the new wolf into that pack because the other pack members will follow the lead of the alpha. But Sasha fought off the first two males we brought in here. She really, really wanted to be left alone.

  “So we realized right away that getting her back into a pack was going to be difficult. Other than the time she was thrown in with the four wolves in the spare room—which wasn’t very long, maybe only a few months—we weren’t certain she’d ever even been in a pack. If she had originally been purchased or adopted as a pup, she may have been in a single dog home, which meant she might not have any pack assimilation experience. She has all the right instincts, of course, but wolves who’ve been in a human pack or even isolated by themselves in a backyard enclosure often resist assimilation into a wolf or dog pack because they have been taught to prefer isolation and independence. In the wild, we call that a ‘lone wolf.’”

  “What’s wrong with being a lone wolf?” Delaney mused out loud. “Can’t she just live on her own?” She found herself empathizing with Sasha. Sometimes life dealt you too many hard blows. It was easier to just go it alone.

  “Well,” he said carefully, “she could certainly do that, but it wouldn’t be good for her. Like humans, wolves are designed to live in families. Lone wolves in the wild don’t have the life expectancy of a pack wolf, and most wolf experts will tell you that wolves are just happier and more content in the context of their pack. Inside the pack, there are dynamics to manage, of course—like jockeying for position with the other wolves—but there are also all the shared benefits of living, hunting, and sticking together. There is safety and security in the pack and a beautiful interdependence where every wolf in the pack has a role and a purpose.”

  While Drew had been talking, Sasha had begun to inch closer to the fence. There was something about Drew’s gentle, even tone of voice that was very soothing, and he had made no sudden movements with his hands or arms. She would take a step or two forward and then sit down again, watching him closely and listening to the subtle inflections of his voice.

  “You know, Delaney,” Drew said, turning his head slightly to look over his shoulder at her, “It’s the same way in God’s family.”

  She tilted her head to the side, weighing his words. “Where God is the alpha?”

  “And the Omega,” Drew couldn’t resist adding with a slight smile. “And now that I think about it in pack language,” he added thoughtfully, “God isn’t just the beginning and the end. He’s the Master and the Servant—the One we serve and the One who came to serve. He’s the dominant Alpha and the submissive Omega.”

  “Submissive—how?” Delaney’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. Somehow, this didn’t seem to be the right image of God.

  “Christ on the cross,” Drew said solemnly. “I can’t think of a greater picture of humble submission.”

  Delaney nodded slowly. She could see how Drew would view it that way. Christians believed that Christ humbled himself by setting aside access to his divinity, pouring himself into human flesh, and then dying a sacrificial death on the cross to open the door for humanity to once again live in right relationship with God. I have come not to be served but to serve. Jesus’ words echoed in Delaney’s mind.

  “In a pack, the submissive omega wolf occupies the lowest position in the hierarchy and takes on the role of the scapegoat,” Drew explained. “The other wolves often take out their aggressions and frustrations on the omega, which may seem cruel to the omega but is actually very critical to pack structure because it keeps wars from breaking out within the pack and prevents the entire pack from being destroyed. In the wild, where the omega sometimes gets pushed out or decides to leave, packs have been observed to go into a period of mourning, completely dysfunctional and miserable, because their omega is gone and their pack order has been disrupted.”

  “Scapegoat…wow.” Delaney exhaled, struck by the analogy. “That’s the same word often used to describe Christ.”

  “Yes, it is. Christ was the ultimate Omega. But God is first and foremost the Alpha—the head of the pack, the father of the family, and the one who protects and defends us.” Drew paused, considering whether to push the envelope, and then said, “Even when we don’t think he’s doing so.”

  Delaney sighed audibly. “I really struggle with that, Drew. I’ve seen a lot of examples of God not protecting or defending someone. Bad things happen to people every day.” While she was talking, Sasha took another couple of steps toward Drew and sat down again. She was now about two feet from the fence. “Who can trust a God who is so selective with his protection?”

  After a long pause, Drew said quietly, “I promise you, God was watching over you, Delaney.”

  Her heart froze. “Wha-at?” she stammered, backing up instinctively. Sasha’s eyes darted over to Delaney, ears cocked toward the sound of her footsteps on the gravel-laden walkway. “What do you mean?”

  Drew reached up to grab the chain-link fence and put his head down on his outstretched arm. He wanted badly to get up, turn around and pull Delaney into his arms but this was ground he had covered before. The beautiful creature sitting just a few feet away on the other side of the fence was a powerful reminder to him that trust had to be earned slowly. So he kept his head down and did not turn to face the woman behind him. Instead, he said in a low, gentle voice, “I know what happened to you.”

  Claire. The first zing Delaney felt was a flash of anger at the woman for sharing her story without her permission. This was immediately followed by such a profound sense of mortification that Delaney nearly jumped into the driver’s seat of the UTV to head back to the house. But she couldn’t make her feet move. Inexplicably, she was rooted where she was, deeply fearful of both his judgment and his pity but unable to walk away. She defaulted to the most comfortable position she knew—numb indifference. “She had no right to tell you that,” she said in a disembodied voice.

  “She didn’t,” he hastened to reassure her. “She would never betray your confidence. But she didn’t realize the kitchen window was cracked open to the back porch. I heard some of what you were saying, even though I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry, Delaney…truly. But I promise you I would never repeat what I heard. I only want to honor your story.”

  “Honor my story?” she countered in bewildered pain. He had said the same thing about Sasha. “What does that even mean? I don’t want to honor it. There’s absolutely nothing honorable about it.”

  “You can’t honor a person without honoring their story, because it’s a part of who they are,” Drew replied, struggling to keep his voice even, “And even in the short time I’ve known you, it’s impossible not to honor who you are, Delaney.”

  His words wrapped around her like a caress, and her lip began to quiver. “You don’t
know me,” Delaney whispered. “You have no idea who I am or what I’ve done.”

  “That’s true. I don’t,” Drew conceded, shifting from his squatting position to kneel on one knee. He reached into his pocket to pull out a plastic sandwich bag containing some strips of raw bacon. “But I’m still impressed by what I see…even more so now knowing what you’ve been through.”

  Sasha then took her final steps forward until her nose was at the fence. Drew stuck a rolled-up strip of bacon through the chain link, and the wolf bared her teeth, taking the meat quickly and cleanly between them, and then swallowing it almost whole. She sat down again and waited for Drew to offer more. Up to that point, Delaney hadn’t been paying much attention to what Sasha was doing, she had been so engrossed in the story Drew had been telling and distracted by the shift in conversation. But when the wolf stepped forward to take the bacon from Drew’s hand, it suddenly dawned on Delaney that this action was incongruous with the story Drew had been telling.

  “Wait…I thought you said she wouldn’t let anyone near her?” she asked suddenly, curiosity overriding her other tumultuous feelings. “How did you get her to come to you?”

  Drew stood up and stepped backward until he was beside Delaney. “It’s been a process. Like I said before, it started with getting her to a safe place where she could heal. She’s physically doing very well—eating, sleeping, and gaining weight like she should. But it’s taking a lot longer to address her psychological wounds and earn her trust. It’s taken three months just to get her to come to me like she just did. I started out just sitting under that tree over there next to the gate. I didn’t approach her—just watched over her. She would occasionally stick her head out of her den and contemplate my presence, but she didn’t come out or draw close. Then she started coming out of the den and climbing up on one of the platforms to watch me. Once she got used to the idea of me being there, I started bringing something to feed her, usually bacon because the aroma is something a wolf can’t resist. Eventually, she came down from the platform and started making her way toward me.”

  Delaney shot him an assessing sideways look, still reeling from the revelation that he had overheard her conversation with Claire and uncertain how to react to him knowing it. How had she held onto this secret her whole life and now within the span of a day, two people who were relative strangers to her had managed to unearth it? She should probably be angrier than she was, but on some level, there was a profound sense of relief that finally someone knew. And now that he did know, Drew was handling that knowledge with care, neither repulsed by it nor morbidly curious about it. Instead, he had brought her to meet an abused wolf and show her what healing can look like. Tears pricked her eyes in sudden awareness and gratitude. “You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?” she asked with a wan smile.

  Drew decided it was time to put all his cards on the table. He turned to face her, inwardly praying for the Holy Spirit to move between them, and said, “Yes, I am. Delaney, God does the same thing with us. He doesn’t force himself into our circumstances. He simply watches over us, makes his presence known in myriad ways, and invites us to draw closer. And just like with Sasha, it’s a process. He loves us so much that he is patient to wait until we feel safe in his presence, until we trust him enough to lay down our fears and come to him on our own. And when we do…he has so much in his hands to give us.”

  He saw fear, confusion, and even anger warring in her eyes. But he also saw something else. Hope. His heart thumped cartwheels in his chest and he held his breath, waiting for her to either pull away or lean in to what he was saying.

  “But where was he when all those things were happening to me, Drew?” she asked in a heartbreaking whisper, her eyes searching his face earnestly.

  He looked down into her upturned face, felt himself falling into the deep well of her unguarded azure gaze, and said with compassion, “My guess is that he was sitting under a tree somewhere very close by, watching over you and working all things for your good.”

  “How? Where?” She realized in that moment that she had never wanted anything more in her life than to believe the things he was saying.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly, “but I promise you this: If you have the courage to revisit your story, I believe God will show you exactly where he was. You will discover all the ways he was truly protecting and defending you.”

  “He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever.”

  —Chinese proverb

  Drew’s words were still echoing in Delaney’s mind hours later when she was back in her hotel room, Rogue stretched out beside her and a marathon of Will and Grace episodes filling the room with witty banter. She had thought of little else since they had left Timber Ridge and Drew had dropped her off at the hotel. Their exchange at Sasha’s enclosure had been too powerful for her to deny. She could not compartmentalize it or dismiss it.

  Something was happening to her. More to the point, something was happening in her. Just a week ago, her life had been on autopilot. Even through her divorce, she had navigated it all with deft precision, managing the details of her legal affairs, work commitments, and friendships admirably. She would not have identified herself as having “issues,” but if someone had asked her if she was happy, she couldn’t truthfully have answered “yes.” Had she ever been truly happy? She realized now that she had been sleep walking through her life—living some kind of a zombie half-life, where she was physically present but emotionally comatose.

  Coming back to Georgia had awakened something in her, something she had tried to forget, to bury, and to burn. But like a phoenix rising from the ashes, there were some things that just could not be killed by fire. And her soul was one of them. She shook her head at the irony of everything she had experienced over the last six days. She had come home to a place filled with dark and painful memories and to places she never wanted to set foot in again—like churches, funerals and cemeteries, and Southern porch swings. Yet what she had experienced instead was a series of starkly contrasting alternates. Juxtaposed against the rough and dirty canvas she’d painted in her mind was another portrait entirely.

  Where she had dreaded encountering Shady Oaks Community Church and the rather oppressive brand of fundamentalism it espoused, she had found herself at Refresh Station, and suddenly she had a new view of what a community of faith could look like. Her aunt’s funeral, though both dreaded and dreadful, had offered her surprising and deeply touching comfort. And the gentle and beautiful hearts of Claire Sheffield and Drew Hemming had been the most unexpected treasure—both uncommonly good people who were speaking more timely truth into her life than she could ever have imagined she needed. And then there was Sasha. Nothing could have prepared Delaney for the impact that wolf would have on her heart. After hearing about her rehabilitation, Delaney had watched the animal for quite a long time, observing the way she interacted with Drew. Despite the abuse that had been described to her, she could see that Sasha was healthy, thriving, and making progress. She was healing, and Delaney had been deeply inspired by her story.

  “If you have the courage to revisit your story…”

  Her story. She would never have used that word before now to describe her life. It didn’t occur to her to think of it that way. But after visiting Timber Ridge and hearing the stories of the wolves there, she now realized that everyone has a narrative—a book being written about their lives. Like Sasha, Delaney’s book had been inscribed with some dark and painful opening chapters, and as much as she had wanted to rip those pages out, burn them, and pretend like her life had started at chapter twenty, she was discovering that you can’t erase your history. Those chapters were part of her story, and although her dark early chapters had been forcibly written by someone else’s hand, she was beginning to suspect that those chapters had propelled her down the wrong storyline, where subsequent painful and mistake-filled chapters had bee
n written by her own hand.

  She sighed, absentmindedly rubbing Rogue’s velvety ears. The dog stretched in her sleep, legs spanning the other half of the bed and paws splayed out to reveal her webbed toes. Her tail twitched appreciatively as Delaney continued to scratch and pet her. Rogue had spent a rapturous day being played with and fed treats by Jade and then taken on a long, winding exploration through the sanctuary trails, where she had chased everything from fox squirrels to lizards. She’d even encountered a king snake that had led her on a merry chase through the palmettos before it flicked its tongue goodbye and disappeared.

  Just then Delaney’s cell phone rang. It was Lexie.

  “Hey, girl,” Delaney said with a smile. “What’s up?”

  “Just checking on you,” Lexie replied. “How are you surviving down there?”

  Delaney grinned at her friend’s question. Like many New Yorkers, Lexie was suspicious of Southerners, whom she believed to be mostly country bumpkins. She had told Delaney many times that it was ironic that her best friend had turned out to be a Savannah girl with a Southern drawl and a love for fried chicken.

  “It’s going pretty well, actually,” she responded. “The funeral was lovely, and Claire and the others have been wonderful.”

  “What others?” Lexie asked, curious.

  “The people from my Aunt Beth’s church, mostly. I didn’t know it, but my aunt and Claire left the church I grew up in and had been attending a different one in downtown Savannah. It’s nondenominational and much more progressive than our church had been. The people there are amazing. You should see the church, Lex. It’s a refurbished old fire station with all this amazing shiplap and reclaimed wood and the most amazing vintage chairs. It’s gorgeous!”

  Lexie heard something unusual in Delaney’s voice but she couldn’t pinpoint it. “That’s unique,” she said evenly, “though churches have always been some of the prettiest buildings you find in a city or a town. I never heard one being made from a fire station, though.”