The hummingbird is improbable. I am exhausted just
reading the stats about his breaths per minute (250), heartbeats per second (21), or oxygen consumption (10 times that of an Olympic
athlete).
This tiny bird works hard, but it can really hustle. Hummingbirds fly fast enough to get a speeding ticket on my street. Going backwards. Since it eats its weight in nectar every day, a shortage of the right flowers can mean starvation. To stave it off, the hummingbird falls into a kind of hibernation at night, lowering its metabolism to one fifteenth of what is burns through in high gear.
Watching my birds every morning as
I do brings home the promise in Luke.
"Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor about the body, what you will put on. Life is more than food and the body is more than clothing. Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse not barn, and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds?"
It calms me to try trust on for size. The engineering
that went into the creation of the humble hummingbird astounds me. God invites me to have faith as big as a mustard seed. Maybe I will try for the breadth of a hummingbird's wings. Who knows where that could carry me.
