Acting Like Animals

This past long weekend, after Sunday service, Jenny and I took the kids and Jenny’s parents to Palm Springs for an overnight getaway. The hotel accommodations were nice, the round of golf with my father-in-law was fun, the food was good, and the time swimming with the kids was refreshing, but the thing that sticks out the most as I look back upon the trip was a Yellowstone National Park documentary on Animal Planet Channel. Weird, I know.

After a short swim the first evening we arrived, we came back to the room for a late dinner and because we don’t have cable at home, we curiously flipped through a couple of channels before landing on Animal Planet and being captivated by the harsh battles the animals faced in this unforgiving, yet majestic, place.
 

Bison in a harsh Yellowstone winter storm.

Just trying to survive

What was clear is that the main toil and focus of all the animals was focused on one thing: eating enough food to stay alive and survive the winter.

Whether the animals were hunting in packs, scavenging another animal's kill, picking or stealing nuts, shoveling snow with their snouts for a few blades of grass, stock piling food, traversing rivers and plains, or dueling for territory, everything was fueled by the instinct to survive.

This morning as I was sitting with God, and as some of the scenes from the Yellowstone documentary came flooding back, He was reminding me that much of the human experience is no different from the animal kingdom. For many of us, we’re just trying to survive! We get up each morning and go through the same mundane routine each day without much thought or meaning. We’re putting in a day’s work because we need a day’s pay. And those days pile on, one after another. Weeks pass. Months become years and before we know it, we’ve hit mid-life or our supposed golden years. And if we were never intentional about excavating meaning out of our days, that meaning remains buried. We’ve eeked out a living but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve acted no different than the animals.

This is the trap of the devil and the plight of too many people. If Satan can keep our stomachs aching with hunger and our eyes focused only on the immediate winter that confronts us, we will act like animals.

God’s call for the church to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty recognizes the primacy of life’s basic needs. When hunger hollows out a person’s vitality, his stomach must first be filled with food before his mind can be freed to think of God.

But our lives were meant for so much more than food and drink and clothing, and our existence more than just surviving each ensuing winter. Man was created to have dominion over the animal kingdom, not act like one of them.

Let us not live short-sighted. Live and work for more than a paycheck and what that can buy. Serve and glorify God through your work and with the rising of each day!