Bee Accepted

This story, Bee Accepted, within A Hive of Busy Bees by Effie Williams, is truly one of love. (I promised I would share after the last post didn’t I?) The first part of this story is about the love of a shepherd whose very job is to watch over and protect his flock. He takes them out to pasture but returns each evening to put them in a pen, the fold. As the shepherd reaches the pen he counts each sheep as it passes the gate, making sure he has each and every one.

Now I said gate, but the beauty is there was no gate on this pen that the shepherd put his sheep into. At night he would lie down in the opening of the pen acting as a living gate. That way he would know if anything came in or went out. He was their protector and provider and they heeded his voice.

The person telling this portion says wouldn’t it be nice to own the verse, “The Lord is MY shepherd”? Wouldn’t it be nice to be within the loving protection of the fold of the Lord, to be His sheep and He your shepherd? The invitation goes out so eloquently to bee accepted into God’s family.

The second part of this story begins with some men driving past a farm and noticing the sheep out in the meadow. One sheep looked a little off, like his coat was actually sewn on. Upon arriving at the farm they inquire of the farmer about the sheep. He tells them a mother sheep lost her baby and a baby lamb lost its mother. The farmer sees one and one and thinks why not make two? He puts the lost baby with the grieving mother to see if she will take it as her own. She goes near the little lamb and then starts to buck and kick. Before serious damage is done to the baby the farmer takes the lamb out of the pen. He puts the mother back in the pen with her little dead lamb and finds she calms down immediately. He figures she knows her baby by its smell. Getting desperate to make this situation work and to save the living baby lamb he decides to take the coat off the dead lamb and put it around the living one. Once the coat was tied on he reintroduced the little lamb and the grieving mother. She came near again and found that what she smelled was familiar and so she began to nurse the lamb. She accepted the little lamb as her own.

As the family talks over this story it becomes this beautiful depiction of the Lord and his love for us, his lost sheep. How when He looks at us and sees us, sin and all, we just aren’t acceptable to him. However when we choose Jesus, when we are welcomed into the fold of God, we are given a new coat, a new skin, the cloak of Christ. From then on when the Father looks at us he sees the cloak of His Son and we are accepted.

My retelling just cannot do this chapter justice. Such a sweet, sweet message of the love of a Father and the lengths He went to so that we wouldn’t have to be lost but rather accepted as members of His fold.