In some parts of Canada, where the country is still thinly settled by
people, wild animals are quite numerous. In one of these communities
there once lived a boy who was in the village late one night. He had
been at the village-store, and had heard the men talking about a wildcat
that had been seen in that neighbourhood a short time before.
The boy was not a coward, but when he started for his home, three miles
away, in the country, he was nervous. Nothing happened, however, until
he was climbing over a set of bars at the end of a lane leading through
a piece of woods near his home. Then he heard the bushes moving and
twigs crackling under the feet of some animal the other side of the
lane-fence. He thought of the wildcat. He jumped to the ground, picked
up a heavy stick he had seen under a tree on his way through that day
and listened. Nearer and nearer came the rustling of the bushes, and
every little while he could hear an animal sniff the air. Finally it
came to the fence, clambered up opposite him. The boy raised his club
and waited, and when the animal jumped down beside him, its eyes shining
in the darkness, he struck with all his might. Off the beast went into
the darkness. All was silence again, and the boy stood listening and
trembling. Then from the top of a nearby hill he heard a dog howl with
pain. He found, next morning, that it was only a neighbour's dog that
had frightened him so.
That boy is not the only one who has seen things mistakenly, just
because he was afraid. If you are dreading something, you will think
that everything that happens brings the thing you dread. Usually nothing
happens at all. The trouble was only in the person's mind, just as that
wildcat was in the boy's mind, and so every noise he could not explain
was a wildcat.
I am sure David must have known something about that fear when, as a
boy, he watched his sheep out on the lonely hills at night. But David
learned that there was One who was able to protect him by night as well
as by day. It was God. And so he wrote of God: "He that keepeth thee
will not slumber. God is thy keeper. God is thy shade upon thy right
hand. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the
arrow that flieth by day; for the pestilence that walketh in
darkness.... It shall not come nigh thee."
Let us remember that no real harm can come to us unless it comes from
within ourselves. God is our protector. In His love we can trust by day,
and in His care we can lay us down to sleep at night without a fear.