ENCROACHER

We have been out of town and came home to some nubs in our cutting garden.  I thought that Beth had come over to water and had cut the flowers.  Mike's first thought was to go get his game camera.  

Before breakfast this morning, we couldn't wait to see if the camera caught anything on night #1.

Sure enough, here is Ms. Naughty, grazing by the 1a.m. moonlight.

Now, the good news is she doesn't like EVERYTHING in the garden.

She could care less about the "gumdrop" coneflowers or the "orange glory" butterfly plant.

She turned up her nose @ this beautiful "coral reef" bee balm...and the purple coneflower.

She must have stepped or sat on this "oranges-and-lemon" blanket flower.

But the bad news is...she thinks tomato plants and phlox are yummy.  We HAD been looking forward to some homegrown tomatoes.  But those will take a while to come back since she ate them halfway down.

The phlox I took personally.  That is one of my "go to" cut flower perennials.

Look how she stripped the poor phlox.  She must have a space between her two front teeth.  I know a good dentist...

The red penta is in the middle of a "tangerine dream"cone flower and a black-eyed Susan.  Of course, you have to take my word for it that it was full of red blossoms.  Deer must also be penta lovers.

Ms. Naughty and her short spotted dependants have a clump of woods behind the house that belongs to them.  True, our buffet is tempting, but it doesn't belong to them.  They need to honor the white picket fence.

I was thinking about how much we paid for this land and how irrelevant that is to the encroacher.  So now do we invest in a tacky electric fence...or get up each night @1 o'clock...or just give up the fight?  Two weeks ago we saw her fawns out playing.  This afternoon we saw them again and they seem to have grown a foot.  Soon we will have THREE naughty fence-vaulters.

So now what?  This boundary issue won't end well.  The lovely Ms. N has mistakenly chosen the cutting garden of a hunter's wife.  She may have gotten in the wrong buffet line.

God knows that His children have to deal daily with another kind of encroacher whose modus operandi is to ignore boundaries, wait for the opportunity of darkness, and jump into places without permission.

There's no snoozing with that encroacher.  If we let down our guard, we're toast.  Nubs.  We need a Defender who never sleeps and who knows what is in the darkness.  If I honor the words He left me, I have a fence which keeps the encroacher at bay.

My Protector paid a high price for His defense system.  And it works.

"Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.  Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith."  1Peter 5.8,9