We started our little excursion with great
expectations. We were eagerly anticipating
the excited exclamations over all the new experiences to come.
My wife and I were given the opportunity to take our then 11
month old granddaughter Kaya to the zoo for the first time. We thought that the variety of the animals
would consume all of her attention, and that she would thrill to the sites of
all the exotic places represented in the confines of the zoo.
We were wrong.
At our house she is fascinated by the dog and the cat.
I think it’s probably fair to say the fascination is not
necessarily mutual. While our dog
seemingly can’t get enough of her, the cat tends to quietly walk (or run) the
other way when she approaches her. There
at the zoo she saw animals like the giraffe, the tiger, monkeys, snakes,
flamingoes, and even the rear paw of a lion who was wisely lounging in the
shade of a rock in the 103 degree heat.
They used to have a hippo, which was kind of fun to watch when they fed
it, but I think it died several years ago and they haven’t put anything else in
its pen. How do you tell when a hippo is
dead anyway? Does it actually go belly
up like a goldfish, or does it just float there like it does when it’s
alive? Something to ponder. Anyway, I suppose the heat had something to
do with Kaya’s lack of appreciation as well; it certainly sapped a lot of our enthusiasm.
Instead, when she was given the opportunity to choose her
own object of interest, she sat down on the ground and picked up a dried
leaf. She stared at it in fascination
for a few moments and then proceeded to bring it toward her mouth for a taste
test. I’m relatively confident that she
has a discerning enough palate that she would have grimaced and spit it out,
but you never really know at that age so my wife deftly intercepted it before
she reached her goal.
In retrospect I suppose we should have expected this. She was at a stage in her development where
she was more acutely concerned with what was immediately within her reach. The dog and the cat are within her reach; the
giraffe and the screaming monkey were not.
It seems as though we often have an appreciation of simple
things only when we first discover them, or when know we are about to lose them
forever.
The beginning or the end.
The first flush of passion in a relationship puts our entire
life plan in a new light. By the same
token, the end of that relationship will often cause us to make terribly unwise
decisions that we only recognize as unwise in hindsight.
When we find ourselves in a situation that we dislike our
tendency is to berate ourselves (or someone else depending on how well we
accept personal responsibility) for the actions we took that put us there
instead of dealing with the situation as it is.
Over the years as Kaya has grown I have watched her develop
in ways that I knew would eventually happen, but astound me even though I
expect them. When she was two she had a
different point of view.
On a typical drive home for my daughter Jennifer, and Kaya
they were just driving along talking about whatever came to Kaya’s mind. She was talking about some trees. Jennifer asked, “How big were they?”
Holding her hands up above her head as high as she could
Kaya replied,
“They were THIS big!”
And then, with her hands still in the air, she looked to the
side and asked,
“Do trees have armpits?”
Jennifer laughed, and I laughed when she told me about
it. But then I started to think about it
a little.
Do trees have
armpits?
My immediate and automatic response is “no”, but how do I know this? Just because I never thought to ask the
question doesn’t automatically mean it’s not so. I can’t recall anytime in my life in which
I’ve heard the words “trees” and “armpits” in the same sentence.
So who am I to say “no” definitively?
So I did some research.
We have a sycamore tree in our front yard that I planted
several years ago. It has grown well and
quickly, but I’m going to have to cut it down and plant another one. I didn’t plant it correctly and now I have a
lot of surface roots, and surface roots on a tree that can grow to 30-40 feet
tall right in front of my house is not a good thing. Anyway, it has a lot of low branches that are
perfect for just this kind of research.
I went out to the front yard, at night, after looking around carefully
to make sure no one was watching, and I sniffed the tree right where the branch
joins the trunk. It smelled like I would
expect a tree to smell; kind of green, and woody. Definitely woody.
I smelled another part of the tree at the trunk. It was the same.
Next I went to that source of information that everyone
knows is absolutely ironclad in its accuracy: the internet.
I actually found several references to the armpits of trees,
but they were used figuratively by artists in their description of a tree. No one really identified a tree armpit as an
actual thing.
Regardless, I don’t think I will ever look at the point
where the branch of a tree meets the trunk in the same way ever again.
Kaya is now three and a half, and her dialogue has taken
another turn.
In another discussion with her mother she stated,
“I think when God made me it was like a puzzle for Him.”
“What do you mean?” asked her mother.
“I mean that when God put me together it was like putting a
puzzle together.”
I’m pretty sure when I was three and a half I NEVER got
philosophical about the process of my creation.
It occurs to me when she says something new that she is in
the process of discovery. She sees it
all with new eyes. No matter how many
times she sees something, or how much she actually knows about it, she seems to
sense that there is still something about it that is new to her. There is still some mystery left in
everything, but I, in my adult “wisdom”, have chosen to focus only on what I
know instead of pursuing what I don’t know.
In doing so I have remained safely rooted on the “solid” ground of my
own knowledge. I have effectively
clipped my own wings. I have bound
myself to man’s earth and denied myself the heavens.
Jesus said, “Behold I am making all things new.” (Rev.
21:5). This is the same line that we Christians only read occasionally and
rarely ever apply. It takes a crisis of
major proportion to bring us to the point where we see the old as new, and the
sunrise as original as the sunset. My
granddaughter is fascinated with dried leaves, and yet it takes space probes to
Mars and beyond to hold my attention. I
cannot make a leaf or a blade of grass, and yet the process of its growth only
concerns me as far as my need to rake it up or mow it down. Even closer to home
is my own body. I abuse it regularly,
but I take little heed from my doctor when he tells me what I need to do to
care for it properly, and it is such an incredible wonder of creation!
And I can’t be the only one to realize at moments like this
that in the end I really have no ability to create anything at all. The only skill man has is to manipulate what
has already been created. We certainly
have the ability to warp and abuse this creation, and we do so regularly to our
shame, but really create? No.
The simple fact that we exist as created beings means that we cannot
create something out of nothing, because we ourselves are created. The title of
Creator can only be applied to the one who was there first, and that is God
alone; the First and Last, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.
We are only stewards of what is.
There are things to wonder at all around us, but our
preoccupation with “progress” and “forward” thinking causes all of them to be
ignored, left to lie haphazardly in our destructive wake, and leaves us in a
related state of ignorance.
Once discovered, how can I ignore the reality of what He
sets before me?
It may seem as though this indicates some special divine attention
to my life, but that is not so. He gives
the same attention to each of us, and I am loved by Him no more than anyone
else, but just as certainly no less. He
loves each of us with His whole being; for when we are told “God is Love” it
means that He is Love. He is the only
source of it. It is who He is.
It is when my pursuit of His presence takes an active note
in my life that I begin to see things more clearly, because a relationship with
Him requires my active participation,
just as He has actively put me in
this world. It is my responsibility to
move in this life rather than sit and wait for my inevitable death. I cannot sit and do nothing while I am pinned
beneath the boulder of my doubts. What
holds me back must be let go, done away with, cut off. Amputation is
never pretty whether it’s done in the wilderness or on the surgeon’s table, but
it is often necessary for survival. The
truth of the matter is that a relationship with Christ is a transaction: You
give Him all of you, and He gives you more than you could ever be on your own,
and more than you ever even thought to want.
The process of discovery, as I recognize all that He puts in
front of me, is His method of showing me His active, daily presence.
This is where I discover the gap in my life.
This is a gap that even the love of God will not cross.
It is the gap of my own choice.
That choice is the most important thing that Christ has
given me. It is the only thing that
allows grace to save me from His wrath, for while God is love He is also just,
and in His justice He demands that all debts be paid by me, or by Him.
And I myself am wholly incapable of settling that debt.
And so the process of discovery, while usually worked out at
the beginning or the end, really should be a continuous practice that starts at
the beginning and never has an end. It has eternal
potential depending on our choice.
Christmas is the offer, Good Friday is the payment, Easter
is the redemption, and His flowing blood is the currency of my survival.
My choice of Him seals the transaction in my favor.
The Choice, beloved (for you are His beloved), is yours.
©2008 Dan Bode
