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Wednesday Wonder
May 9, 2018
Why is it that we are so thrilled when an exception to the expected appears? Is it because we have tired of the ordinary? Or fear sameness? Or does it just tickle the part of our brain that screens and expects to see what it expects to see?
Just recently I was driving down Forum Blvd and traffic slowed to a crawl up ahead. I thought, "Oh no, there's been some accident." But there was no accident. By the time I arrived at the bottleneck I saw why. It was Tina the Turkey (who is really a male). I had heard rumors of the bird, a story that made the front page of the newspaper. This is the original urban turkey, domesticated, fearless. It must not be Thanksgiving time.
 Truth be told some people feed Tina, which probably explains a lot. And most people are not hunting at the intersection of Forum and Chapel Hill. So Tina seems quite at home. Drivers go out of their way to keep Tina safe. I suppose they would do the same for a jaguar or a walrus. Sure, make yourself at home even though you are way out of place.
But we like certain things out of place. Not all the time, just some of the time.
So this is what I think. I think God shows up in the world like Tina does, out of place, an anomaly in the world of the expected. We think life is going to be one way but it ends up another. We thought we would be here but we move to there. We started with one vision of how we thought our lives would be but end up living a very different version.
Perhaps it is not a surprise that the Celtic symbol for the Spirit is the wild goose - free, beautiful, breaking the silence. When we are awake we notice the divine disturbances and interruptions that make life oh so more interesting. Like Tina.
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