My prayer for the rhinos
What a privilege it is for me to spend time on a wild animal game farm in South Africa! I love being there among all the wild animals and birds of the African bush. These animals include giraffes, buffalo, warthogs, and many different buck (antelope). One thing I love to do is sit on the steps of the back veranda of the farmhouse with my husband and watch the rhinos as they appear out of the bush. Silently they arrive from every direction to feed at the dam nearby. Sometimes they come alone, and sometimes they arrive with their young ones. It doesn’t take long before the herd is a happy family eating the food especially prepared for them by the farmer and the farmworkers.
Vonnie the rhino introduces her baby
Each of the rhinos has been given a name. We have such fun watching George and his
ladies, as they lie in the mud to keep cool, spar with one another, or toss the feed into the air. A most special time is when a baby rhino is introduced to us. How sweet they look as they drink from their mothers. Often a baby will lie in its mother’s shade to get out of the hot African sun while she eats undisturbed. Once the rhinos have had their fill, they disappear back into the bush as quietly and as quickly as they arrived—without a sound.
The intelligence, love, kindness, alertness, graciousness, gentleness, and playfulness that these magnificent creatures constantly express have taught me wonderful lessons about God’s beautiful creation. But the lessons have not stopped here. This past year, I’ve been learning greater lessons that led me to place these animals in God’s care and understand that the only place that they could be is in God’s universe of infinite goodness.
My husband and I were devastated when we were told that Melissa, Robyn, and baby Ava had been shot. They had become victims to ruthless, professional poachers, who had stolen their horns and left without a trace. The police warned that the poachers would be back to get the other rhinos, and we should be particularly vigilant during the full moon. Immediately, an expert tracker was hired to look after the rhinos and see if there were any foreign tracks coming into or leaving the farm.
Rhino poaching is a very big problem in South Africa. Hundreds are killed every year, and their horns smuggled out of Africa to be sold in Asia, where many people believe that they have special healing powers. This means that soon the rhinos could be threatened with extinction. We were told that it was normal for the poachers to hide on the farm for days, or even weeks, waiting for an opportunity to kill the remaining rhinos. The thought of finding these men in the dense bush, which covered thousands of acres, made me feel that the situation was a hopeless one. “What could one tracker do against these thieves and murderers in the night?” I wondered in despair. I was overcome with fear and a sense of hopelessness. The thought that this evil was more powerful than God, good, though, woke me up and made me take a stand.
All was not lost—there was something I could do. I could pray in the way I have learned through my study of Christian Science. Instead of staying with this hopeless picture, I started to search for comfort and help in the Christian Science Bible Lessons, which include citations from the Bible and from Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. I also read articles in the Sentinel and The Christian Science Journal and spent many hours studying and praying into the night or in the early hours of the morning. How grateful I was to Mary Baker Eddy for revealing a scientific way of praying and for the Church that she founded that enables me to access all of these inspired articles in this remote area in Africa.
We are not helpless because God is not helpless.
To start with, I prayed to God to help the rhinos, and then in the morning, I would drive around the farm to see if He had. I feared the worst, doubting that the rhinos could be helped as long as the poachers were on the loose. As I continued to pray, claiming the truth that God alone was in control of His universe, it became clear to me that by trying to protect those innocent animals against these evil people, I had entered into the dream of the material senses, which makes evil a reality and a power and a presence. This was not the way I had been taught to pray. Science and Health explains: “The God-principle is omnipresent and omnipotent. God is everywhere, and nothing apart from Him is present or has power” (p. 473). What I needed to do was break from the way this whole situation had mesmerized me and how it was continually attracting my thoughts toward the idea that there was still evil on the farm. How? Jesus said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). That is what I needed to do—take my stand in divine Truth and stay with it. So I started to claim the truth about God and His creation as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis: “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (1:31, emphasis added). I realized that there is only one power, one presence, and that is God, and God is good and in control of all. I could trust that whatever was telling me otherwise, God would expose. In the presence of God’s authority, or power, anything that is not good cannot exist. We are not helpless because God is not helpless. It is evil that is helpless as it has no source, or backing, or foundation. Evil has no authority or power.
Again the poachers struck, but this time they only wounded Annette. She managed to get away safely with her baby calf. You can imagine our joy when we watched her coming to feed the following evening. On the day we found Annette, seven poachers were arrested on another farm about 20 kilometers away. It was thought that they could be the men who had also been on this farm.
But I still felt uneasy about the situation and knew that more prayer was needed. As I prayed, the thought “Expect good” came to mind. “Of course,” I thought, “Jesus promised that if you know the Truth, you will be free.” If you enter the postal code on a satellite navigation system (or GPS) or if you get onto a particular highway, you expect to reach your destination. Claiming and knowing the truth about God and His creation, I knew that I could expect this truth to be evident in my life.
The statement in the Bible, “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord” (Psalms 33:5) jolted me again and again to watch my thinking. Did I believe that the rhinos were good and the poachers were evil? I asked myself. This question stopped me short in my tracks. I realized that this was the belief in two creations, one good and one bad. But God made only one creation. In Science and Health, I read: “Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death. The real man cannot depart from holiness, nor can God, by whom man is evolved, engender the capacity or freedom to sin” (p. 475). There is no place in God’s universe where God and His good creation do not exist. All that was present in my experience, and on the farm, was God and His manifestation. I strove to let nothing else enter into my consciousness. I reasoned that I could be conscious only of God—Love, Truth, and Life.
As I kept praying in this way, the fear that evil lurked on the farm began to fade, and with conviction, I then knew that God was in control. God is good and ever present. Peace reigned in my thought and around me. Instead of looking at the rhinos with fear for their safety and the expectancy that they, too, would be shot, I saw them as living and moving and having their being in the presence and power of Love, God (see Acts 17:28).
A short while later, two armed men were arrested just outside the farm with rhino horns in their vehicle. About the same time, I saw a television interview with one of the government ministers. During the interview she said that it was important to get to the root cause of the problem of rhino poaching and that the South African government intended to take important steps to help educate those in other countries, who are paying millions for rhino horns, with the truth that these horns possess no medicinal properties.
Prayer is effective. Good is not helpless. I continue to pray for this situation in Africa, not only for the rhinos, but also that I can take my stand, stay conscious of God’s goodness, and witness the fulfillment of this biblical promise: “For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).
