I am finally under way to my assigned country, but this month’s post is not about that.
A few days before I left, a hummingbird got trapped in our house, & I learned some things.
When frightened, a hummingbird’s instinct is to fly straight up as fast as they can, hoping to stay out of reach of attack. In the same way, most of us who go into this line of work have hopefully developed similar impulses to direct ourselves God-ward at the slightest provocation.
Generally, this is a good thing. The hummingbird is one of the most athletic flying creatures in existence, & when it puts all its efforts into rising upward no one can catch it. But in some circumstances—e.g., when trapped in a house with a high ceiling & a skylight—this reflex can actually lead to injury as it flies headlong into something it doesn’t understand.
The ceiling was so high, that I had to reach up with a long pole in hopes of getting the bird to perch on it so I could lower it safely & take it out the door. But the bird doesn’t know this. It is frightened in an unfamiliar situation—it cannot possibly understand why its usual tactics are not working or why it is finding it impossible to rise to the open sky above.
Sometimes it would get tired & perch on the pole, but it would always attempt to fly back up before I could get it lowered & out the door.
But eventually, exhausted, it has no choice but to fall to the ground.
A bird so spent that it cannot fly is easy to catch, but that does not mean it is an easy task to take it safely outside. Hummingbirds are notoriously delicate creatures—even using gloves can sometimes be enough to accidentally crush them in your grasp. I am not God: I am a soul & spirit & awkwardly-proportioned meat bag.
Sometimes we are me in this analogy & sometimes we are the bird. All of us Goers go as part of a team. Teams can be large or small—well-established or new—but all are made up of individuals, & at one time or another we all play both roles.
When the honeymoon period wears off & culture shock starts setting in, or when we’ve had a particularly draining week of ministry, or the support raising just isn’t going as well as it was two weeks ago, we can be like the hummingbird: banging our head against the glass trying to do what we know is good & had always worked for us before.
When we see our teammates running up against their blind spots or merely going through the motions instead of staying actively engaged with God, we can be like the human: we can’t actually help all that much, be we can reach out & try to point them towards the door.
Ultimately it’s about trust & sincerity. Trusting God has surrounded us with the exact people we need to get through whatever He knows we’ll go through, & sincerely doing your best to help them when they need it—remembering that they too are just delicate creatures that you could crush without even trying, regardless of how fast or strong they are in their physicality or faith.
There’s a reason we go in teams. Because only by helping one another draw ever nearer to God can we fly in the full freedom of our God-given potential.