Bouncing Ducks

On the last Sunday of my first call, rubber duckies flew.

Allow me to unpack that sentence a bit. In August of 2011, I began serving as an associate in a church; in late September 2011, I was ordained as a minister of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in the North Carolina Synod. Synod is a Greek word meaning "journeying along the way together," syn- (as in "synagogue") + hodos, the way, the journey, the path. "Together along the journey." North Carolina is one of 65 synods in the ELCA.

As a candidate, I would not be ordained until a congregation had extended a call. That is, a congregation, following procedures, had to invite me to be a pastor, to be together along the journey with those people of God, after which I could be ordained.

I am 5 feet 1 inch tall; the bishop was 6 feet 8 (probably still is). The pictures are entertaining.

I began serving in the congregation in mid-August of 2011. Certain parts of the service were not mine to lead until I was ordained, in late September, when the bishop was able to preside. Almost exactly two years later, after the senior pastor had retired, my journey with this community came to an end.

I shared stories about rubber duckies. As planned together with the interim senior pastor and the ushers, at the close of the sermon, I tossed the duckies, one at a time, into the congregation. My dad snagged one, which he keeps on the kitchen counter. And -- this is a priceless memory -- when I turned to make sure members of the choir got some duckies, a tall alto in the back row, widowed during our time together, and a woman with whom I share a birthday ... she put her arm straight up and grabbed the duckie.

Does she still have it? I do not know. But I still have that memory.

What brought it to the forefront? A snippet in a nature documentary showing a mother duck nudging her babies from the nest. Each duckling in turn plummets to earth, lands, bounces a bit, and regains its feet.*

One of the truths I had to learn for myself as a mom is that babies bounce. The collective wisdom of the great cloud of witnesses knows that, and had used that truth to comfort the hubs and me when we were new parents. Even so ... when our toddling first-born bit his tongue and it bled, I had to soothe myself to soothe him. With the second-born, we just checked to make sure it wasn't the ears or a main artery. As our ducklings plummet to earth, and bounce, we watch and pray and try to remember to keep breathing.

How astonishingly complex and limitlessly wise (say that three times, quickly or even at all) is the Creator of the Cosmos, who knows that we bounce, and that we are to watch and pray and breathe. And who in God's infinite wisdom and creativity endowed Peter Ganine, a sculptor, to patent his sculpture of a duck in the 1940s and then "reproduce it as a floating toy."**

Never may I cease to wonder at the infinite complexity of the cosmos and my place within it, connected with everyone and everything else. I commend to you the poem "The Journey" by the late Mary Oliver.

*Planet Earth, David Attenborough.
**"Rubber Ducks," Wikipedia.