As a deer longs for flowing streams,

so my soul longs for you, O my God.

Psalm 42

On my early morning drive for a newspaper and pastry in Michigan last weekend I noticed movement in the field beside the road. Four deer, two does and two fawns, stood as still as statues, maybe fifty yards away. I pulled over to the side of the road, rolled down the window. We stayed like that for a minute or so, watching one another, motionless, quiet. Finally, one doe moved, turned around and like a drill team the other three followed and the bounded off across the field, the way they had come earlier, and I watched as their white tails disappeared into the woods.

I know they are pests: farmers and gardeners alike detest them. They have eaten my flowers as well: colorful begonias I plant in the midst of the myrtle and they bloom, bright red, yellow, orange all summer. Until the deer eat them, that is. A few years ago in the midst of a long, sustained cold spell with a foot of snow on the ground, deer, I was told, were starving and eating anything green they could find. So they stripped three small pine trees of all their needles up to the heights of their reach. My little trees survived but look odd with green needles on the top and completely bare branches and trunk beneath. I do smile every time I see them.

This past summer, with plenty of rain, plants and shrubs thrived. It was a good year particularly for my hostas, green, lush, robust. On a weekend visit in July, I surveyed my garden as soon as we arrived and to my surprised chagrin my hostas were gone, the leaves sheared off a few inches from the ground, the tall flowers gone too.

Nevertheless, I love seeing them, the deer. It is always a moment of quiet grace, a reminder of something – something like the mystery and wonder of the world, something like the precious resilience of creation, something like the quiet majesty of the Creator.