Happy Birthday, Clover!

Reflections on Life

“What is a ‘happy birthday’ post doing on a Substack that has a theme of faith, trauma, and chronic illness?” you may wonder.

Let me perplex you even more. Clover, the birthday girl, is a rabbit, a small brown mini lop, to be exact.

One year ago, Clover was born. I wouldn’t know of her birth for nine more weeks, but when she was taking her first breaths outside the warmth of her mother’s womb, I was braving the cold of a February night to walk from the car and into an art museum.

It wasn’t long before I came across a painting of Rip Van Winkle.

Old Rip Van Winkle and I have some things in common. As I began to recover from chronic illness and return to previous activities and a more active life, sometimes I felt as I imagined he felt when he woke. I began to reintegrate myself into the lives of friends and into a life where I could focus more on things such as school and learning new skills. Some things were the same as they were eight years before. The sun still rose every morning. The mail truck still rolled through the neighborhood at roughly the same time of day. The family dog still barked loudly when he wanted to be fed.

But many things were not the same. Friends had received their driver licenses, graduated high school, and were in college. Relatives had died. In some ways, I related more easily to people more than double my age because I had adulted and matured early through my young struggles and could not deny the harsh realities of living in a world cursed by sin. And at the same time, I related better in some ways to people several years younger than me because I was in a similar stage of life where I didn’t yet have my diploma and didn’t know what was next. Sometimes I felt as if everyone’s lives had moved on while I spent years in bed.

But no matter your past and trauma, everyone has a choice to make. Will you choose to move forward, or will you choose to stay stuck?

Will you choose to look for the good and beautiful or let your brain’s natural negativity bias control you?

Will you choose to be responsible for what you can be, take steps towards building a life you enjoy and that honors God, or resort to living in apathy?

As I rebuilt my life, I knew I wanted a pet rabbit again. I’d kept rabbits before becoming ill, and going outside at the break of dawn to care for them had been one of my favorite things. So, with some help from my dad, I built a hutch in the garage one chilly April afternoon. There was only thing left to do: find a rabbit that would call that hutch her home. I searched online, and before sundown that day, nine-week-old Clover was making her home in the freshly screwed together wooden hutch with aspen chips lining the floor.

She was an outdoor rabbit at first, but when some foxes moved into the neighborhood a week or two later, I made a space for her hutch in my office. She hasn’t moved outside again and is living a very good rabbit life.

Clover is a glimmer to me. She is cute and sweet and likes to nudge me with her nose and lick my hand. She likes to run around my office and has grown her confidence enough that she now hops up the two stairs at the end of the room and runs down the hallway while I chase her. She likes to be wrapped in a towel and to chew holes in it. She likes to sit on my lap while I work at my computer. As far as I can tell, she lives a life that is full of curiosity, full of wonder, and full of happiness, which are a few aspects of the life I strive to live. Sure, Clover hasn’t faced the same struggles as me, and unlike me, she is not made in the image of God. But she was still knit together by Him, and she has still been an example to me of living with wonder and joy.

So, with that I say, “Happy first birthday, Clover!” I hope you will join me, not just in celebrating the life of my little rabbit, but your own precious life that God has given you. May our lives be lived well and full of thanksgiving and joy.