A Tale of a Lost Bunny

Recently, l headed to the mall to meet a friend and her delightful, always adorably pigtailed 3-year-old.  The mall is enormous—the largest in Canada—so for ease of finding each other, we met at the full-sized pirate ship in the middle. 

As my friend and I greeted each other, her toddler clutched her favourite stuffed bunny and played on the ship’s bridge. Beneath the bridge was a rocky cliff alongside a large indoor lagoon. Carefully, the little girl lifted Bunny to the bridge’s rail…and Bunny flew out of her hands and crashed to the rocks below!

Now, Bunny wasn’t just any old toy. She’d been her constant companion since the week she was born! Leaving Bunny behind on the rocks wasn’t an option. Hastily, my friend and I searched for solutions. She reached over the rail—but Bunny was too far down. We tried stretching out my cane but still couldn’t touch Bunny.  As tears filled the little one’s eyes, I promised, “We’ll rescue Bunny! She’ll be back in no time.” I mean, how hard could it be to retrieve a dropped toy? 

My friend called the mall information line; things must be dropped off the bridge all the time. Surely, they’d have a solution. The solution? For $300 (!!!), they’d call a scuba diver to swim through the lagoon to the rocks. Or, for $50, we could wait days or even weeks until someone else hired the divers.

In addition to being an embarrassingly valuable lesson to look in all directions for solutions to problems instead of fixating on the obvious one in front of us, the situation brought to mind Luke 15’s Parable of the Lost Sheep.

While the latter option was better on paper, Bunny was needed in just a few hours for an essential duty: naptime cuddles. 

So, we put our heads together like two middle-aged mamas with eight kids between us, scheming for solutions. I was contemplating dashing to a hardware store to buy duct tape and an ultra-long pole to see if Bunny might stick to it and be pulled up, when a cleaning lady with a long mop and a soft heart for sad toddlers walked by. Using her mop, she was just about able to reach Bunny—but couldn’t. She tried her mop at a different angle, but Bunny was simply out of reach.

The cleaning lady called the marine staff who care for the animals that perform in the lagoon. They agreed to come—but didn’t show up. A family stopped by; the dad lay on the bridge, pushing the mop through the rail’s bottom—but Bunny remained stubbornly unreachable. After almost two hours of fruitless attempts, a young maintenance guy sauntered by. He pointed out we’d all been trying to reach Bunny via the side of the bridge where she’d fallen. However, if we turned around to the other side of the bridge, the rocks below were much higher up, the perfect height for an agile person to scamper down onto! 

With ease, he flung himself off the other side and onto the rocks, then carefully crept under the bridge to the rocky spot where Bunny lay. Within minutes, she was safely back in her overjoyed toddler’s arms.  In addition to being an embarrassingly valuable lesson to look in all directions for solutions to problems instead of fixating on the obvious one in front of us, the situation brought to mind Luke 15’s Parable of the Lost Sheep.

Sinful people were gathering around Jesus, causing the Pharisees and teachers of the law to contemptuously mutter, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them!”  

Jesus responded, “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’  I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”

The self-righteous religious folks were upset Jesus was hanging out with people they deemed unworthy of a relationship with him or of receiving his welcome. But Jesus didn’t see it this way. He didn’t see these “sinners” as less worthy of his love, attention, teaching, or compassion.

Prioritizing each of us as infinitely precious and worthy of his entire focus, care, love, and relationship, when one of us is lost, he leaps right over the rail. 

To my friend’s daughter, once Bunny dove off the rail, time stopped. Nothing mattered but saving her. To an infinitely greater degree, to Jesus, once a person is lost—nothing matters more than reaching them. 

And yet, as hard as it may be to admit, instead of emulating Jesus’ inclusive, loving approach to racing off to help a lost one, it’s often our nature to follow the way of the Pharisees. To stick tight to legalistic rule-following and close our hearts to those we deem unworthy of help.

When this is done by God lovers seeking to impact others through social justice, love, and care, it can cause extreme damage.

When we judge others and deem them lesser, we change how we interact with, treat, and care for them. We don’t go after them as readily when they are lost or devote ourselves to trying solution upon solution upon solution until one works.

Jesus does this. Prioritizing each of us as infinitely precious and worthy of his entire focus, care, love, and relationship, when one of us is lost, he leaps right over the rail. 

He doesn’t stop to take score of whether we deserve his help; immediately, he goes off searching—and keeps searching and searching and searching until we are found. What an example! We are to do likewise.

Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons