26/10/2025
Do you remember being told the story of the shepherd and the lion (or Androcles and the Lion)? Are you sitting comfortably?…
There was once a peaceful village in the foothills of a mountain. One night a ferocious lion came down to the village, snarling and lashing out, and the villagers were very, very scared. They put together a committee of the decision makers, and these wise ones picked the strongest fighters from the village to collect together their mightiest weapons. The lion visited the village, spreading terror, every night. And each night the fighters approached the lion, throwing their spears at him, waving fire in his face and shouting. The lion did not retreat but became more and more enraged. The villagers were in despair.
There was a boy from the village who had been out in the mountains grazing the sheep, and was returning to the village. He was nearly home but night had fallen so he took the sheep to the mountainside and huddled for shelter in a cave. It was only when he lit his fire for the night that he noticed the lion, cowering in the depths of the cave. Upon seeing the fire, the lion began to snarl and growl at the shepherd boy. The boy was deciding whether to run or fight for his life, when he noticed the lion had a huge thorn in his paw. The lion wasn’t murderous, he was in pain. Calmly he approached the lion, gently pulled the thorn from his paw and wrapped the wound in his own blanket. The lion instantly calmed and soon fell asleep in front of the fire, exhausted.
We have all been that lion. We know something is wrong, and we might even approach others for help. But we don’t know that we are in pain. We don’t know what is causing that pain and we certainly don’t know how to resolve it. That pain is causing us to feel really, really scared. So we lash out. We might lash out at others, but more importantly we lash out at ourselves, punishing ourselves with our mightiest weapons, telling ourselves that we need to try harder, we’re not good enough, perhaps that we are mad, bad or sad, or even that we are unloveable and worthy of rejection.
Sometimes it takes another person to notice that we have a huge thorn in our paw. And that each day we have been walking on it, pushing it further into our softest, most exposed parts.
There will always be thorns. Perhaps we might be able to live in a way where we understand our thorns, where we are able to explain or show them to others. And to live in a way where we know others have their own thorns and we can give them the gift of grace to let them bear their unresolved pain.
