Under His Wings

July 2025

Dear Friends

Take your dog through a field of sheep at this time of year and listen to the noise as lambs are quickly recalled to the safety of their mother’s side!  This desire to protect offspring is seen across the animal world and we feel it too.

When danger comes near, parents instinctively search for their little ones and wrap their arms around them.  When children go missing, or when they begin to treat their parents as ‘the enemy’, the deeply-felt longing is to be able to hug them once again.

God thinks like that too.  He speaks of ‘finding’ his child Israel in the desert and shielding and caring for him like a eagle spreading its wings over its young. (Deuteronomy 32:10-11)

And Jesus was the same.  When he thought about how the people of Jerusalem had distanced themselves from him and his Father he wept for them.   "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34 19:41)

What could draw us back to our Creator when we know we have distanced ourselves from him?  Does this powerful image of our heavenly Father’s grief over his missing children and his longing to gather you up again move you?

And if you’ve never felt that God was a Father to you then take a look at the astonishing Bible account of Ruth.  She was from the people of Moab who were no friends of God’s people.  Tragically widowed as a young woman she decides to count the people of her Israelite mother-in-law as her own.  Boaz, who eventually marries her, declares: “May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge." (Ruth 2:12)

It was a homecoming to a home and a Father that she never knew she had!

Sincerely

Graham Burrows