At 5:20 this morning, two raccoons began fighting beneath my open bedroom window.
I had planned to sleep in.
The night before, I had stayed up later than usual, comforted by the thought that morning would allow me to remain curled beneath the warm blankets for a little longer. There were no alarms demanding an early start and no reason to exchange the warmth of the bed for the cool air coming through the window.
At least, that had been the plan.
The night had already awakened me once.
All day yesterday, we had been expecting a storm. The forecast included wind, rain and the possibility of hail, so earlier in the day I moved all our vehicles beneath cover.
The storm waited until approximately 1:30 in the morning to make its entrance.
Lightning did not seem to come from any single direction. It flashed from every corner of the sky, with each second appearing to belong to another burst of light. Thunder followed. The wind moved through the trees and pressed against the house.
It was quite a spectacle.
Yet the storm brought no rain and none of the expected hail. It filled the sky with light and the night with noise, then passed without damaging anything.
Eventually, the lightning moved farther away, the thunder softened and I returned to sleep.
Then came 5:20.
The sound beneath my window was not thunder. It was hissing, snarling and the unmistakable disturbance of gravel. Two raccoons had chosen the landing at the end of our driveway as the site of what appeared to be an important territorial disagreement.
There is plenty of room around our place.
Of all the available Montana, both raccoons apparently wanted the same few square feet.
I lay there listening and wondering why either one cared so much about that particular patch of gravel. One could have moved several yards in any direction and found more unoccupied space than it could possibly use. Territorial jostling seemed unnecessary when there was so little territory worth defending and so much territory available.
I understand that raccoons are simply raccoons. They do not attend conflict-resolution seminars, submit themselves to pastoral counseling or pause to consider whether a disagreement is worth disturbing someone’s sleep.
Still, as I listened to them fight, my thoughts returned to the message I had preached the previous morning.
Judges 11 tells the story of Jephthah, a rejected man who became a mighty warrior. When the Ammonites threatened Israel, the people who had once driven him away invited him home because they needed someone who knew how to fight.
Jephthah defeated the enemy beyond Israel’s borders, but he carried another enemy home. His wounds, his need to secure what had once been denied to him and his mistaken belief that God’s favor could be negotiated through a bargain all followed him through his own front door.
His daughter paid the cost.
That was the warning of the message: we can win the battle everyone sees while losing the one that matters most. The enemy outside us may be defeated while the fear, grievance or false belief within us remains fully armed.
The raccoons made me think even more about the message our church will hear six mornings from now.
Judges 12 begins immediately after Israel’s victory over Ammon. The external threat has passed, but peace does not follow. The men of Ephraim arrive with a grievance. They accuse Jephthah of failing to include them in the battle and threaten to burn his house down over him.
The complaint was not entirely new. Earlier in Judges, Ephraim brought a similar grievance to Gideon. Gideon answered carefully, honored them and allowed their anger to subside.
Jephthah was not Gideon.
He responded with accusation and force. Words became weapons, resentment became warfare and Israelites began killing other Israelites. By the end of the conflict, forty-two thousand men of Ephraim were dead.
The same kind of complaint produced two very different endings.
The difference was not merely what was said. The difference was what those words encountered inside the person who heard them.
A humble answer found a way toward peace.
An old wound found another war.
With a little encouragement from Selena’s flashlight, the raccoons disappeared into the darkness and the gravel beneath my window grew quiet. But I remained awake, thinking about the two storms that had interrupted the night.
The first came from the sky. It announced itself in the forecast and illuminated the horizon when it arrived. We could not prevent the lightning or silence the thunder.
The second began much closer to the ground.
We are generally better at recognizing dangers on the horizon than the pressure gathering within us. Those storms seldom appear on radar.
They gather around an insult we keep rehearsing, a place we believe must be defended, an old rejection we have never surrendered or a fear that convinces us another person’s presence threatens our own. They may begin quietly, but once released, other people are forced to live beneath them.
Not every conflict is caused by a lack of room.
Sometimes there is plenty of room, but something within us has decided there cannot be room for both of us.
Peace requires more than the absence of opposition. It requires the humility to believe that another person does not have to lose for us to have a place. It asks us to surrender the need to make new people pay old debts and to let God heal the wounds that otherwise turn every disagreement into another battlefield.
At 5:20 this morning, I found myself asking a harder question:
Have I given the people nearest to me any reason to brace themselves for storms I have refused to surrender?
The world will send enough weather across their lives.
By the grace of God, I do not need to add my own.
Until next time,
George
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