Sheep, Foxes, and a Shepherd

I'm going to let this story stand on its own, without (too much) exposition:

I visited my folks in late June to take my son and my dad to a Cardinals baseball game, which we won with the help of 2 homeruns by Pujols! One of my son's favourite activities whilst visiting my parents is to assist in feeding the sheep, of which my father has scores. On the Sunday morning of that visit, after the feeding, we went inside while my father went to the road to retrieve the newspaper for my mother. As everyone else is sitting in the kitchen getting ready for breakfast, I see Dad quickly running through the utility room (at the back entrance of the house, adjacent to the kitchen) into his bedroom. Yeah, that grabbed my curiosity, but before I could make it to the utility room to see what he was doing, he was already on his way back outside with his ... wait for it ...

12-gauge shotgun. Oh yeah! He said there was a fox out in the field with the sheep. I snuck out, following him, which upset Sam who wanted to follow his daddy wherever he was going, but I didn't want his hearing of Fox in Socks to be ruined by this moment, even holy as I considered it to be.

Dad quietly scurried to the fence, raised the gun and with the fox, who had a dead lamb that had recently been born hanging from his mouth, in his sights, he shot it down. That was the last time that fox disrupted my dad's flock (or any other flock, for that matter).

Okay, I have to say this...

There is risk in portraying violence when it comes to the nature of God's rescuing us from the hands of evil, because, after all, you don't want the audience to infer that violence is the means by which we should spread good news. Yet violence belongs in the language in some way because it took blood and death to set us free and a very big part of what happened at Calvary was how Christ, in his death, dealt with the powers of evil.

On a related note, I've been praying the Lord's Prayer (or 'Our Father') with Sam every night since, well, he was born. I am trying to use some language that Sam may understand and I've arrived at this for the last portion of the prayer:

"Help us stay out of trouble where we can avoid it, but when trouble comes our way, Lord, rescue us."