Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Robert Howson
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Expectations enrich our experiences. Looking forward to an event is like adding seasoning to an otherwise bland kettle of soup. It brings out the flavors that may already be present and makes them sing praises to our taste buds. And so it was as we planned a trip to Costa Rica. Having never been there before we knew we would experience many things that were exciting and new to us. Leafing through the pages of a book on the birds of that country prompted us to create a wish list of species we hoped to encounter. That list didn’t incorporate rare and difficult types we had little chance of seeing. Instead, it was made up of those we thought we might have a good chance of seeing if we were in the correct environment.
Toward the top of that list were two that were indirectly in the tanager family, honeycreepers. These colorful birds with long decurved bills are found in the forest canopy. As their name implies, they feed in part on nectar from flowers (20%) but most of their nourishment comes from fruit which makes up 60% of their diet. The remainder of their diet comes from insects, but this increases during breeding season as the young require more protein.
And we weren’t disappointed. This male Green Honeycreeper paraded a shade of blue-green seldom seen in the bird world. These birds were more beautiful in real life than they were displayed on the pages of our books. And the same is undoubtedly true of our picture of the earth to come. Notice how Paul reinforces this idea for us: “But we are citizens of Heaven; our outlook goes beyond this world to the hopeful expectation of the saviour who will come from Heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will re-make these wretched bodies of ours to resemble his own glorious body, by that power of his which makes him the master of everything that is.” (Philippians 3:20-21 J.B. Phillips New Testament)