Common Ground

One spring day I woke up to a mysterious tapping noise.
It was there for a second time while I was eating my breakfast and just as I was going out the door to work it started again.
The next morning there it was again and by the third morning I was starting to worry!
I tried to imagine a conversation with my friends about regularly hearing unexplained tapping noises and decided that I needed to discover the source of the noise …and quickly!
So, early the next morning, I set myself up on a stake out.
Our garden is home to some fairy wrens. They are small and very beautiful birds and they are feisty.
Determined to protect their eggs, and always expecting the worst, these wrens see threat and danger everywhere they look! They start pecking at their own reflections in the windows of the house just as soon as the sun comes up! Tap, tap, tap.
They spend hours every day pecking at their own reflections in the windows. They flap and peck and flap and peck until they are exhausted and still they flap and peck some more because the enemy is always there staring back at them!
As I was shaking my head at their stubbornness it occurred to me how like the fairy wren we can be. Determined to find an enemy in the human beings we live and work with; committed to seeing danger and threat in our relationships – always peck, peck, pecking away at each other.
What if we were to stop pecking for a moment?
We just might see how like us the other is – a reflection in fact!
We might find we have a lot more in common than we realise.
We might find some common ground.
This is the way Jesus shows us to live – loving each other as we love ourselves
Why not stop pecking for a bit and look for the common ground this week! 
 
 

Karen Siggins