What Can a Bird Teach Us About Life?
More than you might imagine!
I usually find a male bird pecking at my windows yearly during mating season. Last year, it was a bluebird; this year, it happened to be a cardinal. The cardinal sees his reflection in the window, thinks there is an intruder on his turf, and pecks at it so it will leave. This year, the pecking was unusually severe, so I tried to discourage the cardinal by putting soap on the glass or taping paper inside the window to reduce the reflection. This would stop the pecking at the treated window, but the cardinal would go to another window and peck at the reflection. And, of course, the intruder was always there! To the cardinal, the intruder on his territory was real, but it wasn’t.
What does this have to do with what we call life? There are two versions of reality; one is real, and the other is not. Like the cardinal, we spend most of our lives pecking at the intruder in the window we believe to be real, but it is not. But where does this concept of two realities come from? Jesus. Let me explain.
Jesus of the Bible alludes to two realities. Jesus was all about love, but His connection to love stemmed from His belief in the oneness of all (John 17:21). Jesus commanded that we love everyone, even our enemies, simply because everyone is one. (See here for more details on this.)
But oneness is not the reality we find around us. Everyone is separate from each other and God. Jesus was saying that oneness is the reality created by God and that the reality of separation we see around us is fiction or an illusion. Jesus wanted us to love one another, not to judge and completely forgive one another, as a way to see the oneness God created and as a gateway to Heaven.
Ultimately, you make your reality; you determine what is real for you. If you determine that life here on earth is real for you, that will be the case. If you decide that the oneness God created is real, that will be the case. As Jesus so appropriately said in the Sermon on the Mount:
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matthew 6:24, NASB)
