On a beautiful lawn a little girl was playing all alone. The sun was shining and the birds were singing, and everything seemed full of joy, and little Lucy was quite as happy as the birds and the flowers around her, On the edge of the lawn there lay a fine large fish-pond, where the golden carp and the silver-tench darted hither and thither, their burnished scales glittering in the sunlight like real silver and gold all alive in the water. A prettier scene it would have been hard to find, and in looking on it one might be tempted to forget that sin and death have entered into the world.
But suddenly all is changed. A loud and startling scream in a childish voice, tells that something sad has happened—poor little Lucy has fallen into the fishpond! The water was deep, and the poor little girl could not swim, and although her cry was heard at the house, and her mother who saw the danger from the window, ran to save her, the distance was so great that it was impossible for her to be there in time. But help was nearer than anyone supposed. A favorite dog named Bobby, had been watching the little girl all the time, and when he saw her tumble into the pond, he instantly plunged in after her, and getting his fore-paws under her somehow, he pushed her against the bank, and so kept her from sinking, while he howled with all his might to bring assisnce. Was not this a noble dog? But for him Lucy’s mother and the servants though they hurried to the spot must have been too late to save her from being drowned.
As it was, she seemed as if life was gone when taken out of the water, but they carried her home, put her to bed, rubbed her with warm flannels, and at last made her well.
When her mother came downstairs, who should be waiting at the foot of the staircase but poor Bobby, wagging his tail as if to express his desire to know if the child was restored. The hugs and caresses he got from Lucy’s mother and everybody else, soon satisfied him on, this point, for he had sagacity enough to know that if Lucy was dead, there would not be so much joy as all showed when they met him. Ever after this, if he had been a favorite before, everybody looked on him as quite a friend of the family, and I think you will say he deserved it.
But if the brave old dog was a favorite in the house, with Lucy he was especially so: she seldom went out for a walk without him, and you may depend upon it she never passed that fish-pond but she rembered her faithful deliverer, She always spoke of him as “dear old Bobby,” and no playmate of hers was half so dear, or so constantly in her company, for she could not forget that he had saved her life.
One day her mother asked her why she loved Bobby so much.
“Why, mamma, because he saved me,” said Lucy patting old Bobby on the head, “He saved me, didn’t you Bobby?”
Bobby replied with a wag of his tail, and Lucy’s mother, who was a believer it the Lord Jesus Christ, took occasion to point out another and a better Friend; One who made the faithful dog, the sunshine and the water, the birds and the flowers, the gold and silver ash, and everything beside, and who, although He had created all thing’s,
“Came down to be a man and die” that poor sinners might be saved. He had not merely plunged into the water to save, but had gone down beneath “all the waves and the billows” of God’s wrath. What love was this! Every believer can say that He “His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree;” and if Lucy loved the dog because he saved her from being drowned, how much more should sinners saved by grace from “everlasting burning,” love Jesus, who “loved them and gave Himself for them?”
Are you saved by Him? If you believe in Him, if you really trust in Him with your whole heart, you are. And, if so, do you oft “remember” Him in the way He bade us do “on the same night in which He was betrayed?”
Now you see that even the love which a poor dog showed in saving Lucy’s life was not forgotten; he was dear to her ever after, and she liked him to be with her always.
How much more dear, how precious, should the Saviour be! Yet it is so, that He is sometimes slighted, and that you say and do things now and then which you would not say or do if He was not forgotten.
Do you never go without Him? Are you always in His presence? Does His love constrain you to live to Him who died for you and rose again?
ML 09/20/1942