Cardboard Is No Match For A Lion

  Shelter. It’s one of the basic human needs along with food, and water. Clothes are also on the list (thankfully).  If you’ve ever watched a show where people are dropped in a harsh environment in the middle of nowhere to fend for themselves, the first thing they usually do is build a shelter.
     A fond childhood memory is my best friend and I building a clubhouse. “Build” might be an exaggeration. We mostly just turned a giant cardboard box upside down and hid under it. When an airplane flew over we’d race to the safety of our shelter so as not to get bombed. Maybe it was simply child’s play? Or maybe it was from watching the war drama series MASH which aired on our single channel TVs? Or maybe we’d seen a history video at school? Some of you might remember school drills in the 1950’s called “Duck and Cover” where students dove under their desks and covered their heads in case of an atomic bomb attack. The education system had stopped training that survival tactic by the time Paula and I went through elementary school, but the point is, for whatever reason, we two little girls with big imaginations recognized the basic human need for shelter and leaned into it. Psalm 55:8 “I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm.”
     Caves and rocks, used as shelters since the beginning of time, have proved notably more substantial than cardboard. My ancestors actually lived in a cave until their house was built. And when my mom and her mother, who was also her teacher, walked three miles to Beulah School, they’d take shelter under overhanging rocks to get out of the rain. Job 24:8 “They are wet with the rain of the mountains, and cling to the rock for want of shelter.”
     One year, Uncle Jack made a gigantic tent to shelter two families because we all wanted to be together and save money while vacationing at Kings Island amusement park. He sewed several yards of canvas on an industrial army-grade sewing machine, and while the structure itself was sound, it had no floor. All eight of us slept directly on the ground. During the night, my mom kept fussing with bugs and she was sure we would all be infested with ground fleas, but in the morning light she discovered her pillow was squarely in the middle of an ant trail! Overall we were grateful our tent had provided some protection, as the writer of Psalms 61:4 understood on a grander scale—“Let me dwell in thy tent forever! Oh to be safe under the shelter of thy wings.”
     And there was biblical Jonah. He reluctantly delivered a plan of salvation to the wicked people in Nineveh… and in Jonah chapter four, we see him still stewing. He went to the outskirts of the city and made himself a shelter to sit and watch for the destruction he hoped God would send. The sun was scorching hot so God had a vine grow up over the hut and provide cooling shade. This vine became a tool God used to teach Jonah about His compassion. God’s shelter is always better.
     When the enemy attacks like a prowling lion, the cardboard box some of us have been hiding in is not going to be enough. Not even a tent or roadside rock is a match for some of life’s “bombs”. The good news is: God, Himself, is a shelter for us to run to for protection when the storms of life rage, or the heat of the moment is scorching us, or if we are afraid.  Isaiah 25: 4 describes the Glory of God as a refuge for the poor, a stronghold for the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. May we all find that kind of Shelter.
 

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