I was driving recently down a country road and noticed a great swirling mass of birds up ahead. It swung and dove, left and right. Darting, but in a lumbering sort of way, like a big blanket being swung around the sky. As I watched, I got thinking and wondering about what was happening, about the individual birds in it. Occasionally, it looked liked there were a few stragglers. At times, the stragglers seemed to attract a section of birds to break off in a new direction, only to swoop back to the larger pack within seconds. This made me wonder about the birds at the front, what were they doing, thinking? Did they know they were leading anything? It looked like they were. If they were, were the others following? Or, were they all just flying, in some seemingly cosmic randomness that actually looked planned? And, what about those stragglers, did they know they were...straggling?
I'm guessing that none of them really 'thought' about what they were doing. They were just doing it, out of some great instinctiveness, some design that was built into their birdness, individually and togetherly. I'm guessing the greater percentage of the birds weren't wishing they could lead the flock, nor that the lead birds were wishing the stragglers would do a better job of keeping up. So, I returned to just the marvel of what I was seeing...a great mass of birds, doing their thing as they headed somewhere, designed for them to go.
And I wondered how much we are like a flock of birds. No more in control of our destination or what happens to us than those birds us are, despite what we think of ourselves. Perhaps we could learn from them and just continue to move together wherever we are going, which God only knows. Moving, not comparing ourselves to the 'leaders', not judging those behind us, just flying...together...a bunch of black dots in motion, silhouetted against the sky in a form of beauty that captures someone's earthly imagination from time to time, teaching the observer to consider Something he or she might not have noticed about this life and the wonder of it.
