The Lost Piggy

I need to clean your cage today, Piggy. 

Well, it’s about time.

What do you care?!!! You are a pig.

Actually, I do care… and obviously, more than you realize, says the Pig, something akin to reproach inside his unblinking eyes.

With that kind of response, no excuse for further procrastination seems compelling enough.  I open the door and let the piggy out.  I do this almost every day, allowing him to stretch his little legs and roam around the house. He loves it. He popcorns from the coffee table to the music stand, zooms around the love seat and into the library, the wind messing up his fur, yelling,

Freedom!  Free-eee-dom!

I never fear that the Piggy will get lost, because he knows my voice.  Whenever I call out to him, he always calls out back to me – Squeek, squeak! - and scuttles towards me, because he knows that where the Voice is there his food will be also. 

The cleaning of the cage turned into watering of the garden which turned into picking up the mail which turned into chatting with the next-door neighbor.  Suddenly I remember!

The Piggy!

I race into the house calling out from the door:

Piggy! 

No response.

Piggy!  Piggy!  Where are you?!!! Nothing.  I check all the usual hiding places but Piggy is nowhere to be found. By now my heart is pounding, panic galloping behind. My kids are going to kill me if anything happens to the Pig.

Pi-gg-yyy!!!

Then, I hear a very faint squeak coming from the back of the house. I run into my daughter’s room, checking behind the desk and the laundry basket. Still no piggy.

I am here, under the bed! He says feebly. I’m stuck… can’t move…

I lift up the dust ruffle and there he is, wedged securely from all sides between the bars of the trundle bed.

Some of you were locked in... cruelly confined behind bars... hard sentence... your hearts so heavy    and not a soul in sight to help. Then you called out to God in your desperate condition... Psalm 107:10-16