A Flight of Arrows by Lori Benton

Author:Lori Benton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-19T07:00:00+00:00

These things I have said are hard things to hear—but listen, I am going to say more. I am going to tell you another story about that warrior whose son was taken, which is the same story told from the other side. It is like a basket, these two stories that weave together to make a whole, seen and unseen. I am going to tell you the unseen story now.

Through all the bad that came of what the redcoat did to that warrior and his wife, and the son not taken, Creator was not looking aside as though He did not see. He was busy in it, all the while weaving good things out of it. For when that warrior left his home and went away, he went to a People the missionary had known before—the Senecas—a few of whom had chosen to follow a Jesus path through life. Among them this warrior finally stopped running from his Father in Heaven. He let his heart be caught and broken by the crushing of sin. Not the sin of that redcoat. His own sin. That warrior cried out for forgiveness, and at last in his heart the Great Healing began.

Had all these bad things not come to him, to wound and to rob, would he have softened his heart to the missionary’s God? Who can say? I am only telling you the story of what happened, how that warrior became a man again, one whose wife could without shame claim him as her husband. A man a son could respect and follow.

Even so, while they waited for their lost son to return from that far land where he had gone for white man’s learning, the warrior struggled with a hard thing Creator asked of him—forgiving the redcoat for the thing he had done. But now the warrior had weapons to fight that battle, which he had come to see was not against the redcoat after all but against his own sinful nature, and against the one who is enemy to us all. Those weapons were these: truth like a girding sash; righteousness like leather across the chest; peace like moccasins for feet to walk in; faith like a shield to protect a family; eternal saving a covering for the head.

Word came at last that the lost son had returned to the land of his birth. It was time to face the redcoat, to show everyone who worried about it whether that warrior had given his whole heart to Creator or had held some of it back. But he held nothing back. Though wounded and bleeding, he gave the white shell beads to the redcoat, along with his pledge of peace.

Now here is a thing worth thinking on. That warrior believed he was setting the redcoat free in forgiving him the great wrong done his family, but it was himself he set free. Where once in him was hatred, leading him like a rope around the neck, now there was compassion, even

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