laurelhurst ducks

if you would, i'd like you to imagine me spending a restful sunday afternoon seated upon a bench, overlooking laurelhurst pond (pictured above), letting the cool autumn air and the still warm sun compete for my affections as i looked out over the serene pond, a habitat for many a beautiful duck, spending their own sunday travelling back and forth, to and fro each side of the pond towards the many park-goers turned bread-tossers as the ducks filled their bellies with organic loaves of bread, organic because portlanders demand non-synthetic foods, even for their ducks- nay, especially for their ducks.


sundays are made for this. in fact, God, after 6 days of creation, no doubt sat on a cosmic bench much like mine. yet God's bench surely was much more infinite in essence, looking over the vastness of creation and ducks the likes man has never seen. what i am trying to say here, possibly & unintentionally sacrilegiously (yet hopefully not), is that the sabbath is good.

how nice it has been to simply be today.

for a few hours, i just sat calmly. i caught up with a few friends and family members also. but mainly i just sat, becoming one with the bench. while there, the two of us noticed a few things.

A) these ducks eat a lot of bread. again, these ducks eat a lot of bread. this carbo-loading led me to believe the ducks were going to be running a marathon. how adorable would that be, really: little ducks waddling and quacking for twenty-some-odd miles? adorable yes, yet it didn't seem right.

certainly, i thought to myself, ducks do not live on bread alone (wink-wink). two absurdly old women fed the ducks some type of grain, but that seemed like too much work for the ducks. they had to attempt to get these little things of grain off of the ground, which consisted mostly of small gravel. no doubt many of them ate a great deal of gravel with their grain. but outside of those two crotchety old women, they only ate bread.

B) when the bread came, no matter where it was coming from, the ducks flocked like children to an ice cream truck, children with a dollar that is. bread has a magnetic pull only affective on ducks and immigrants. there was no 'flying v' these ducks formed some type of rabid mob, intent on swiping every last crumb from their brethren. they went after those pieces of bread like kids after candy fallen from a piñata. however, i witnessed only one duck fight. they chased and quacked and flapped their wings angrily until two other ducks got in between them, breaking up the fight.

C) i enjoy watching ducks not chew. watching them choke down big hunks of bread made me feel much better about the way that i eat. yes, watching ducks eat did wonders for my self-esteem.

sadly, i could not leave my wondrous time alone. i had to reflect. i had to let the ducks eating all that bread bother me, on a metaphorical level.

as i strolled out of the park, i read a sign by the pond. basically, the sign was attempting to prevent folks from feeding bread to the ducks. apparently ducks, like people, don't live on bread alone. i don't remember exactly what the sign said, but i do remember this: bread is like cupcakes for ducks. now, initially i thought they really had it made. cupcakes, few would argue, are delicious.

i thought about it. realizing cupcakes are not a well-balanced diet in and of themselves and possibly/sadly not really a part of a well-balanced diet, i saw that we were doing the ducks a disservice. they know they can get as much bread from us as they want. ducks eat when they can, not when they are hungry. yet here we are, throwing cupcakes at them.

this bothered me, because church is like that too much. ministers throw cupcakes at people, who swallow them without every really chewing. once that minister doesn't have the right cupcakes, they swim to another one. neither of them gets what they need. they both get bloated and are of little use when it comes to fulfilling their purpose.

the church needs to go deeper than cupcakes. ministers can make them so readily available that the body forgets there is meat, vegetables and fruits- all those food pyramid things. it falls on the ministers to challenge their congregates to search and seek after God. it falls on the congregates to follow through on that challenge and to extend it back on the ministers. if the church is a body, all of its members need to follow hard after Christ.

writing this, i find myself grateful. i feel i have found a church not satisfied with the cupcakes available to us. for a while, i've wanted to be a part of a church like this, not that my church back home is content to eat cupcakes as a whole. it is a very different type of church than the one i go to in tennessee. i am sure God will shape and grow me as a part of it, however long that is.

something we need to ask ourselves and each other is whether or not we have settled ourselves into a body that is pushing each other to fuller worship, to fuller love and to fuller devotion. if we are in one that isn't, we don't necessarily have to leave. but we need to do everything we can to turn our church and ourselves back to the depth God calls us to.

man doesn't live on cupcakes alone, but on every word of God. we need substance back in our churches, speaking to us, feeding us.