(photo, Esther and Kelly)

My good friend’s daughter, Esther, is the middle child of nine (yes, 9, same mother and father). Esther is a pure-hearted girl who loves good books, adventures, order in the home, and bunnies. I think she was born with her love for bunnies. I was there to witness Esther’s emergence ex utero and she may have been disappointed to find humans, rather than rabbits, as her siblings and parents.

She’s always had a stash of stuffed bunnies and began raising living bunnies before her first birthday — as soon as she proved she could toddle over to a cage with food and water. Her first 4-H project for the county fair? Raising bunnies.

At age four, while at a camp in northern Michigan, Esther lost one of her three stuffed bunnies with whom she slept every night as a somniferous necessity. The bunny’s disappearance was discovered at bedtime, begetting several hours of meltdown and sleeplessness. A “Missing Bunny Bulletin” was issued, naturally, and suddenly dozens of adults with flashlights and tick-repellent took to the wooded paths of the UP of Michigan until the bunny was found, quite miraculously, a mile from camp and returned to its four-year old mother and stuffed siblings. All was well on the earth.

At age seven Esther, three of her siblings, several bunnies and I sat in near-silence, for nearly an hour, in a paddle-boat on a pond, observing translucent powder-blue dragonflies all around us in the reeds. This fact doesn’t advance my story, but it might give you a memory or inkling of the joy of being with children in God's creation. It does for me. Back to the story.

Before long Esther (age 9) was working at a horse farm in Ohio where muckin’ stalls for a morning might get you a free trail ride that afternoon. But Esther’s favorite job was feeding and showing the bunnies in cages. She’d overseen the proliferation of about ten of them.

Last winter we made a fire, popcorn, and watched the inspiring film, Miss Potter, about Beatrix Potter, the English author and illustrator, botanist, and conservationist,who painted Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny into our lives.

Esther had been collecting Peter Rabbit china and books for all of her now eleven years. But last week her mother called to say that their house had caught fire, injuring neither child nor cow nor chicken nor bunny, but the fire and smoke appeared to have destroyed many things.

As I stared at the remains of the house, Esther was quiet and tearful, over by the pond. “I guess it’s time I gave up all that bunny stuff anyway, Aunt Kelly,” she said. “I’m not a kid anymore.” “It’s so weird, how you can have a house, and your own room and things, one day. And a few hours later, it’s all gone.”

I remembered my friend, artist Bruce Herman, who said after their home burned to the ground, “The only paintings I now can see are the ones I’d given away.” We'd figured that the Christian life is always about building in ruins. I also remember that we’d gone through the rubble of his house and found that steel wool and super glue redeemed a few favorite things. I mentioned that to Esther.

In that ember of hope, and with the knowledge that the men with dumpsters were coming the next day, Esther took my hand, grabbed a flashlight, and we began our search, room by room, looking for bunnies whether stuffed, painted on china, or in books. One I recognized as the very stuffed bunny lost and then found in the woods of Michigan. How God must love the little girl who prayed for that one.

By the end of the day we had a picnic table full of floppy ears, noses, and furry black clumps saved from the ashes and beginning the journey of becoming themselves again — which takes some time and steel wool and glue and paint — regaining the image of bunny. Saved and being saved. Believing the impossible. Seeing themselves in the eyes of Esther.