Christian Connections of Oklahoma, Inc.

I have driven by coastal pastures teeming with cows, egrets, herons, and stork-like birds on flat, boggy fields. The disjointed, magnificent-plumed birds fed on all small things and when startled swooped off the fields like bombers clawing for altitude, circling toward some far away target.

So imagine my joy to leave our shop toward our tree-shrouded pond and see a giant blue heron startle and circle on surging wings up through a circle of sky above the pond and fly away.

Our pond is neither large nor closer than hundreds of miles to the nearest coast.

The next day I opened a window toward the pond to see my hoped-for heron launch from the same spot to be out of sight in twenty downbeats of its wings.

Over the days I watched through closed windows, then thought to leave open the windows. The huge blue watched me and returned to feed in and learn our pond. I learned two things as well.

The heron knew my pond better than I. I knew fish don't live in it as it dries up occasionally. Drying up means no water grasses enrich it, and so on, but still the heron stayed and studied the pond as if it held life and would yield food and so it yielded frogs, salamanders and such. I learned that if you stay and study the pond, it will give you its secrets. If you assume you know its wealth it will go on living outside your window and tell you nothing. It doesn't have to tell you a thing.

Yet, for all its study the heron would see me, hear me approach and always mount up on gargantuan wings and be gone.

It left because of me. It never left because of our cats, the neighbor's dog or our horses. It did fear neither armadillo nor possum.

It only feared me.

I am what is wrong with the world: ecologically, biologically, and economically, the rest of creation fears us 3/4 or is owned by us 3/4 and has even more reason to be afraid.

Paul saw my blue heron clearly, writing, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." Romans 8:22.

I see a far future where I may know a blue heron that is unafraid of me, that isn't groaning to see me changed. I believe that because I believe in Jesus, because I believe in what He can do, will do as promised in the Bible. Imagine it as Christmas completed finally.

For now, I am glad that the blue heron knows my pond—and me quite well enough.