Natural Instincts and Harmony

(NOTE:  This one is not in sequence with the other postings or related to my WTBC writings.  Next Saturday we'll pick back up with #4 in the series "Jesus Embodies".) 

Psalm 42:1-2

For the director of music.   

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

My wife has recently been blessed with a new job at a zoo.  Beyond the oft made comments about her vast amount of experience living with me for almost 20 years giving her impeccable credentials, she is being exposed to many new things and new ways of thinking about old things.  Yesterday, as we were in the car riding across the state on a beautiful fall day, we had a great conversation about many facets of her new job.  One of her lessons struck a spiritual chord with me.

She was telling me how she learned from the zoo keepers how adolescent animals have to be removed from the cages they have always called home once they reach a certain age.  They can never return to live with their parents due to a risk of the parents coming to view them a threat and the potential for fights and animal injury.  These actions are driven by instincts not learned, and cannot be trained away.  Despite the natural correlation to adult children who resist leaving home and the common tendency for them to come back that has become rampant in our culture, that's not the new note in the chord I heard (I've heard and sang that note way too often, but that's another story). 

If God cares about the lemurs and servals enough to give them natural instincts for survival in the wild that generations of captive breeding can't take away, He has no doubt put the longing for the spiritual dimension of life inside every person - and that longing is really a hole that only God can fill.  I'm no theology student, and have long ago accepted my limitations on understanding everything God does.  I don't know how He does it, and I have no need to understand it before I believe it.  A clear and beautiful tone.

But the music isn't over; it is always playing.  I have a friend who has a coworker who is more conspicuously adamant about separation of religion and faith from the workplace than what is common in our Midwestern community.  I believe there are two things going on.  The first is that I believe that someone is hearing that natural instinct that God has put inside them, and it's manifesting itself as resistance to Him, to His presence in their life and to other people who demonstrate their faith (even if that demonstration is unintentional).  The second is my friend is an instrument in God's hand.   Can you hear the crescendo swelling as our God directs His chorus and orchestra to participate in an eternal and ever changing  musical involving all creation?

And I ask myself - am I suitable to be an instrument in God's hand?  Am I aware of His presence in my life daily?  Am I aware of the people around me who lack His presence and my opportunity/obligation to play a note in God's symphony that I may be the only one who can?