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The Harlequin duck inhabitats areas where roaring,
crashing of river waters is heard. Often the birds risk being smashed against ledges if they
mistimed a dive.
The more the water is churned, the more its oxygen content and
the greater the abundance and diversity of life is support by the
river. In these chilly waters they glean their living, bobbing up like corks after dives, riding high on the
surface , often being lifted and twisted and whipped around in the
raging waters of some of America's wildest rivers.
It has been said by a 19th century taxidermist that he had seen no other bird
with so many broken and mended bones.
If you have read this far, you may be wondering where this story is going, what it's purpose may be, what the punch line is. I wouldn't blame you if you'd stopped reading and gone on to other pages -
this is a church website , not a nature study.
Yet I feel drawn to the Harlequin duck, it's quirky colours , it's hard life spent among waters
that only the more intrepid of white water canoeists would brave.
The famous Scottish preacher, Henry Drummond (1851-1897), illustrated "Rest" by telling the
story of two painters who each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his
scene still, lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with
a fragile birch tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a branch, almost wet with the cataract's spray, a
robin sat on its nest. Drummond commented "The first was only "Stagnation" the last was "Rest".
For in Rest there always two elements -tranquillity and energy; silence and turbulence; creation and
destruction; fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in Christ."
There is a wonderful truth here, but I wonder it's not also true that our lives
are not spent beside the roaring waters, and quite detatched from it, safe in our own little nest but
rather like the Harlequins, out in the middle of the waters, - continually lifted, twisted, whipped round and yet - "not crushed,
perpelexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed". (2 Cor 4:8) -
Thanks be to God who ever watches over us.
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