A Coyote In A Field Of Wolves

A woman from Tyre fell at Christ’s feet.

Her daughter was demon-possessed. She wanted Him to do something about it.

He ignored her at first. The disciples wanted her sent away. He told her plain: He was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

She kept asking.

Then He said the line every woke preacher I know skips past too fast.

“It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” (Matthew 15:26)

He called her a dog.

She did not argue. She did not write a paragraph about His tone. She just looked Him in the face and said:

“Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” (Matthew 15:27)

That is the verse most Christians underline, and most Christians fail.

She agreed she was a dog.

She just knew where the bread came from.

Her daughter was made whole that very hour.

I have been thinking about that woman all week.

She was outside the covenant. Outside the table. Outside the room where the children of Israel were being fed. She had no claim. She had no standing. She had no right to be there at all.

She came anyway.

And Christ rewarded her for knowing exactly what she was.

There is a kind of man who reads that story and gets uncomfortable. He has been told he is a son. He has been told he is a king. He has been told he is a chosen warrior. He has been told a lot of things that sound right in a sermon and ring hollow at four in the morning, when the house is quiet, and he is the only one awake, with a Bible and a loaded gun by the bed, and a world outside the window that is louder and crazier every day.

That man does not need another sermon about how he is a son.

That man needs to know it is okay to be a coyote in a field of wolves.

It is okay to look crazy to a world that has lost its mind.

It is okay to crawl up to the table and ask for the crumb.

The bread that falls from the King’s table is enough to feed a coyote, a dog, a tax collector, a Canaanite, a thief on a cross, and a man at four in the morning who is not sure he can do this another day.

I am nothing but a dog.

The bread that falls is enough.