I stood in the street with a friend today, watching a little sparrow taking a dust bath. A hollow in the grimy tar road had collected enough road dirt to provide what was for the little Passerine, the mother of all parasite hounding sand-scuffles – there were dust puffs flicked in every direction… but also in the excitement, a seeming oblivion to all that was going on around it. I wondered at the parallel between that little sparrow’s activities and ours.
They, if fed by human hands, would undoubtedly develop a life-threatening dependency to an activated interrelationship quite foreign to their inbred instincts – which is to feed and to take care of themselves. A well-meaning man took it upon himself recently to scatter breadcrumbs at the Dempsey Dam, in Milton, Ontario. This he did dutifully for a few days, until it was pointed out to him, in the wake of a fast growing white cloud of grateful sea gulls, the negative consequences of such benevolence. What would the co-dependent young do, for example, when he was no longer around, or if he moved house, or if he just ‘forgot’ to feed them. But it is actually not to all of these things that my thoughts roam at this minute, it is rather to those whose preoccupation with the immediate, and with the ‘now’, has distracted them from the bigger picture.
Someone asked me recently how clearly did I see what God wanted to do in this season? The answer became more obvious to me as I watched that diminutive sparrow… will we ever know, and do we dare presume to have achieved anything, or to have done enough to warrant ignoring all the other cogs in a factory of cogs? But many of us do similarly in our daily activities – we busily build and live, while continuing to be oblivious of all else. The unspoken legend would be: “I have to live” or “I have to get on with life”, or “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do, what does it matter what goes on around me”, or “my family comes first” et cetera. Shutting out the bigger picture helps none at all for our future. Others in various forms of leadership adopt this attitude also. They say, “the government and people out there can do what they like”, or “let’s get on with it guys, irrespective of what is going on in our city,” or “As long as we are growing, and paying our debts, we’re doing OK” et cetera. If the solution rests neither in the dusty streets, nor in our doubtful philosophies, where does it lay? I am convinced that God’s plan cannot be dichotomized between personal and public, private and corporate, local and Translocal. God is the God of both what is among us, and that which is beyond us.
It can be said that we do have the propensity, like that sparrow, to be ensconced in present activities at the expense of the bigger picture, or to be as those who do not even care one way or the other. The solution predicates that we ought to be neither oblivious of what is beyond us, nor complacent in what is among us. We, unlike the sparrows, have the benefit of foresight… and of hindsight. But a little hindsight, with wisdom, can be quite helpful. I have thus set out a few of these - i.e. what could be considered by some to be the warning signs of “Sparrow-like” oblivion and self-preoccupation:
1. When we fail to factor into all we do God’s grace and mercy… and forgiveness.
2. When we presume that because God told us to do it, that all others ought to do the same.
3. When we make insufficient room in our thinking for our mistakes… and the mistakes of others
4. When we fail to see that it behooves us to change, daily, until God’s job is fully done
5. When we love the little we do to the point of being oblivious of the things we don’t do well at all, and when we fail to appreciate the strengths that others bring to the table of our universal unity.
John Donne wrote in his Devotions 17, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. What did selfish living ever have to do with meaningful life, anyway? We know instinctively, intellectually and by common sense, that nothing that fails to die, as ‘that kernel of wheat’ can produce anything but isolated, individualistic and independent subsistence… at its best. That is why it is necessary to Live, move and have our being in Jesus. To take what God has freely given, and then to turn it to self-gain can only produce a miserable loneliness. No, precious ones, let’s not be as that man who somehow revised all things back to how it suited him. God spoke a word to me on Vancouver Island recently. He said, “When you take your eyes off me, you will hear everything in the light of how it suits you, and not how it changes you”. Robert Browning wrote in “A death in the desert”, “For I say, this is death, and the sole death. When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain, Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, and a lack of love from love made manifest”.
Though the thrill of interaction with all created things may sometimes compel us to reach out a hesitant hand to one of God’s little creatures, we will only see even then, that through the same divine DNA that flows in all His creation, a common thread points us all to the long-term effects of what we do. Life is like a cloth knit together from one corner to the other, each section individually identified, and each color visibly appreciated, but no part separate from the other. Yes! Let’s pay careful attention to all we do, and not claim never to have known how much indeed we do affect each other.
We count it a privilege to be walking with all of you. Loys
Copyright. Loys de Fleuriot
(The beliefs, conclusions, or opinions expressed within this article are entirely those of the author of this article. It is not our intention to suggest either that the authors/writers quoted, in any way agree with what we have written, or that we are expressing their full view on any of the subjects covered)
