Zookeepers, Visitors, and Lions – Which One Are You?

Have you ever gone to the zoo and looked at the animal on the other side of the cage and thought to yourself “What a majestic animal!”? Take a lion for instance. This is such an awesome animal that we get to enjoy the beauty of seeing in a controlled environment behind a cage. But goodness knows if that cage were removed how afraid we would be of that lion! So we think to ourselves – “Thank goodness for the cage!”

Well. It depends on your point of view. If you are the lion the cage imprisons you and serves as a trap. If you are the person enjoying the lion in the cage, you allow yourself to be oblivious to the fact that this lion is not indeed in its natural habitat.

And neither are you.

In a controlled environment, we’ve associated cages with being good for keeping things where we have staged them for our audience’s enjoyment or our own mental sanity. We can often lose sight of the fact that cages are not good when we are caging things that should be free and freeing things that should be not be free.

What Role Do You Play?

Who are you in this story? The zookeeper? The one that profits off of controlling the animal and the entertainment of the people? Or the individual who does not realize that they are being manipulated into a state of sabotaged thinking that cages keep them safe?

That’s a lion staring at you. A lion. Who’s ready to devour anything and everything if ever released from that cage, and, if raised in captivity all its life, that lion is not well prepared for what we call “the wild” which is actually the natural place where it should be residing.

It is not well equipped for home.

The Cages that Keep Us From Freedom

I want you to consider that at different times at some stage of our life we have been all three of these.

At points we have been the zookeeper profiting off of the controlled environment we create around us and mistakenly think we should be keeping. While we are busy maneuvering other individuals through our “zoo”, making sure they see as little as possible of “behind the scenes”, we sadly miss our truest calling. Many people wonder at the absence of their peace even when they chase down and achieve the cages that they thought would set them free.

Other times we are the individual who is intrigued and fixated by the wonder of these fascinating animals. We make sure we keep ourselves far removed from allowing the thought to cross through our minds that there is nothing natural about what is taking place right in front of our eyes. We think we keep ourselves free by observing but not engaging. We’re not in the cage after all, right? When we are functioning in life as the attendee to another’s zoo, cautiously avoiding all responsibility or awareness of things which we might have to speak to, we may in fact be the least free of all three.

And then there is the lion who has been caged when it should have been freed. The result: a majestic creature with the potential to be the King of the Jungle now simply ill-prepared for home.

Our True Home

There is a beautiful scripture in the Bible that Jehovah has gracefully led me to several times throughout my life.

God makes a home for the lonely; He leads the prisoners into prosperity, Only the stubborn and rebellious dwell in a parched land. Psalm 68:6 AMP

Perhaps sometimes we get so tired of being alone that we set ourselves into families, and we find ourselves a home that’s often behind the cage. For that is where we find others that are like us and so we think the cage therefore should be our home. Or we find we no longer care about the cage we are in because laying down a prisoner in someone else’s controlling care keeps us from feeling like we don’t have a home. Better to be caged than be alone, right?

NO.

We don’t belong with the caged lions. Because Jesus came to set the captives free.

We belong to The Lion that conquered and overcame all the cages for us. The Truest King of them all. And in Him, we are never far away from HOME.