Duck, Duck, Goose

I went to the duck park today that is by our apartment.  I like to get out and walk a bit in the sunshine to get both exercise and vitamin D.  It is about a 15 minute walk from our apartment.  There is a pond with a small island of trees in the middle.  I enjoy watching the different birds.  And recently discovered that there are also turtles that live on the island.

This time of year is when the little ones are born.  There have been geese babies and one set of ducklings.  The geese are interesting because they are all a week or two apart in age.  So there are babies, middle schoolers, and your awkward teens.  The teens are now getting their feathers and their wings are growing.  Soon they will learn to fly.  But for now they all just float around and waddle on the grass.

The little ducks were out for a swim today without any parents.  Six baby ducks that are just a few weeks old were swimming around the pond.  I wondered if maybe their mom was the dead duck I saw in the road.  I was feeling sorry for them and wondering what would happen to them.  So I sat and watched them swim around.

One of the little ducks started swimming back the way they had come from.  He seemed to be swimming faster then the others and was gaining distance between himself and his siblings.  I watched him.  Then he started quacking his sweet, little, desperate quack.  I thought maybe his siblings would quack for him to figure out where they were and come back.  Soon, to my surprise, two ducks flew in over my head and came in for a landing by the lost baby.  It was the mom and dad.  They came around the baby and helped him head in the right direction.  They had a ways to go on their journey to get back with the other babies.  So I walked along the edge of the pond watching them go.  Then I heard another little quack.  Another baby had gotten separated from his siblings.  So the parents gathered him too and the four of them kept heading for the other four.  

I walked ahead of the ducks to see where the babies were.  The four little ones were all together.  And then a bird of some sort flew down at them.  All the little ducks ducked underwater and I was so happy that they knew how to do that.  The bird came at them again and horror of horrors, it swooped one of those babies up in his beak and flew off to eat him.

The parents and the two lost but now found babies were with them.  I wondered if the other babies were telling the parents about what happened to the missing baby.  I watched them as they all stopped near where the tragedy happened.  They swam close to the island and the bird swooped down again.  But this time the mom protected the babies defensively.  I watched them a while and thought that it is all just part of nature.  The birds need to eat (although there was a perfectly good dead duck in the road that they could have eaten).

So as I walked home I thought about what happened and tried to come up with an analogy.  I thought about parenting, about churches, schools, and then about youth groups.  The youth group analogy made the most sense.

Sometimes in youth groups you have kids that start going off in the wrong direction.  And they start demanding attention.  Most of the attention goes towards the kids who are lost.  The lessons are not as deep as they could be.  Programs are to reach out to the lost.  There are lots of games and joking around instead of training those who are ready to go deeper.  And while the attention is on those who are not doing so well, the ones who are go off on their own and are left unprepared for when a crisis hits.  And when the crisis hits you never know if one will be lost permanently.

Maybe one adult duck should have been with the group while the other parent went after the lost.