While walking my dog Jude the other day, I saw a duck. Just one.
That might not sound unusual, and to see a duck usually isn’t. But this one was different. This was a baby.
I’ve seen plenty of baby ducks. They nest near the drainage canal across the street from our condo. The canal smells when the tide is out, a little like garbage that’s baked in the sun followed by a whiff of sewage.
Why the ducks have chosen to make this their home I don’t know. Maybe they can’t smell, but whatever the reason, we have lots and lots of ducks around. Which means we often have lots of fuzzy yellow and brown baby ducklings. They are adorable. The kind of adorable that you just can’t argue with. I don’t know anyone who could look at them waddling on their too-big black feet and not smile.
When I’ve seen these babies before, they’ve been in a group. A sort of safety-in-numbers type thing. The brown and white mother is usually hovering near by, ready to squawk if you get too close.
I’ve seen gaggles of five, seven, even nine. And that’s the thing. When they are little, they are always together.
This one was alone.
All alone.
He was on the other side of the street, a far waddle from the safety of the canal. He looked lost and confused, standing on spikes of grass with a drooping banana leaf over his head. I wanted to help him. I wanted to scoop him up and take him home, but I didn’t. I knew he must be there for a reason. Or maybe I hoped he was. That his aloneness had a purpose. That it was part of some greater plan.
Because you see, I often feel like that baby duck: Lost.
And when I’m lost, I want there to be purpose.
I want it to be for something better — something that I can’t see yet because I’m staring at the thick blades of Bermuda grass instead of up in at the huge sky above me.
Jessica Ivaska 
Jess
Wow!!! Your blog hit home!!! Yes, so often I have been the duckling too! More in my later years than when I was young. Up through high school, I felt like that duckling often, usually the “ugly duckling”. Then through college and my early and middle adulthood, I did not feel that way???? But I later years, that duckling has returned??? In looking over my early “duckling” years, I cannot now or before understand the why of such a feeling. In my later years, it has to do with community and the need for care and support from my “village”. Unfortunately, I think I have higher expectations of my “village people” than they know about or even want to know about. After Grandma died, I withdrew from part of my village. As the time went on I had a couple of villagers come and want to know what happened and why I had withdrawn. I told them why. They asked for permission to tell the other villagers …. I said “yes”. After that, still no one else came to talk, to care, to minister to me. What did I learn??? I feel like I learned that I expect too much of people, and I am not in their priority list for caring about. Brings tears to my eyes, but that is the reality. What Christ and his followers have taught us about “loving one another”, sometimes just doesn’t happen, even among the community of believers. Makes me sad because there is, at least for me, so much joy in ministering to others!!! Unfortunately I have learned that we all do not care or support each other. Recently realized in this “village”, I was not “selected” as one not to get support. Another villager needed care and support recently. I reached out, but no one else did???? One villager asked me yesterday about how they were doing, I told her and she said do they need a meal??? I told her I had given them one, but did not know now, some two weeks later???? Do we feel we need permission to care about others??? Was the duckling you saw, looking for an invitation to return, or was he/ she truly lost? I am thinking the later, sadly enough!!! Thanks once again for you words of insight!!!! Love mom
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, mom. I wonder if more of us in the world feel this way but we don’t often talk about it. If so, why not? It is so hard isn’t it? Maybe the duckling was looking for an invitation to return to the group. Maybe when we see someone alone and withdrawn it is our opportunity to invite them? So much to continue thinking about and learning.
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