Flightless

This week I watched a very interesting programme by David Attenborough.  The truth is that I find all of his programmes interesting.  He always seems to come up with new things and very interesting details about creation.  I like his style and way of presenting so when the new programme was televised, of course I had to watch.  It was about birds but not the usual garden kind or even exotic types like birds of paradise.  They were birds that don't fly.  The point was made that when we think of birds we think of creatures that fly, sing and have feathers.  But there is a group of birds that don't fly, can't sing and their 'feathers' are more like fluff and certainly not suitable for flying as the different strands don't have hooks to make them click together in an aerodynamic way.  In fact some of these birds barely have wings at all.  


Scientists still put them in the category of birds because of their DNA and evolutionary history.  Apparently they became land based after the dinosaurs died out and they were no longer predated and so didn't need to fly away to safety.  It was then that they were able to stay on land and grow really big,  unlike the birds that they had evolved from.  There are five birds in this group: the ostrich (Africa), rhea (South America), emu and cassowary (Australia) and the kiwi (New Zealand).  The point that got to me was that although this group of birds were not at all like the usual sort of bird, they were still categorised as birds.  Scientists accepted that even though they were nothing like their distant cousins, they were still birds.  


We humans tend to categorise other people all the time, whether it be by religion, politics, gender, profession, nationality, likes and dislikes, disability and health ... ... and so on.  We have cartoon images in our minds of a beret-wearing, onion-selling Frenchman, a loud American tourist, a pasta-eating Italian, a yodeling Swiss goatherd, a beer-swilling, wurst-eating German ... etc.  Of course we know that not every Frenchman wears a beret and not all of the Swiss yodel.  Just as we don't expect other nationalities to think that all British men wear bowler hats.  But there is a tendency that until we get to know someone then we have a certain image in our minds depending on the category we have placed them in.  I remember many years ago someone who didn't want to tell her Christian friend that she was getting a divorce because she thought that she would disapprove and probably give her a lecture about 'til death us do part'.  Actually the friend would not have reacted in that way, just the opposite but how often we prejudge what people are like because they have been given a label and put into a category. 

An ostrich can't fly, a cassowary can't sing and the 'feathers' and wings of the kiwi are almost non-existent.  Yet they are birds.  Not all Germans drink beer but they are still Germans.  People express their love for and relationship with God in different and varied ways.  Just because someone doesn't fit exactly into our thinking of what a Christian is or  should do doesn't mean that they are not Christians.  Doing things differently doesn't mean it's wrong.  It's just different.  It's a shame that we can easily accept such diversity in the natural world yet find it difficult to do the same with God's human part of creation.  Like the flightless birds, people grow, evolve and change.  God is BIG and all-encompassing and all of his creation is varied and that's the wonder of it.