Lesson from a Plastic Duck's Journey

After fifteen years and nearly 17,000 miles, an unlikely fleet was set to make port on the beaches of Britain. On January 29, 1992, three massive containers on a cargo ship from Hong Kong crashed into the Pacific Ocean during a storm. The containers were filled with brightly colored bathtub toys bound for the United States. Instead, 29,000 little plastic ducks, frogs, beavers, and turtles began a journey that would be carefully monitored by children, oceanographers, and newscasters alike.

After a decade and a half, the tiny bobbing friends had traveled past Japan and back to Alaska, drifted deliberately down the Bering Strait and past the length of Greenland, and carefully floated down the eastern coastline of the United States. They persevered through storms that would have left boats and crews in dire straits. They patiently endured four years frozen in ice as they crossed the Arctic Ocean. They arrived at various intervals on various shores, faded and tattered by sun and surf, some with animal bites and barnacles to show for the journey. But each smiling plastic face seemed to return with an ironic confession: the smallest vessels on tumultuous seas are not necessarily the most vulnerable.

My confession is that life is far more than an attempt to keep my head above water, and yet at times it feels a suited metaphor. Like tiny rubber ducks in an oceanic bathtub, I sometimes feel like I’ve been tossed about the rocks of fear and anger, pulled under by currents of despair and disappointment, and broken at times by the journey. I recognize that my physical, mental, and spiritual frailness is often as startlingly obvious as the image of a bath toy in the Bering Strait. I, at times, am almost averse to this fragility, whether seen in myself or in others. Fighting to keep afloat in an unpredictable sea, I take on distracting cargo and build defensive walls—anything that makes me feel less like a tiny vessel lost at sea and more like a giant ship passing in the night.

But metaphors of strength can be misleading, and vulnerability is often misunderstood. Though most of my life, I may have been reluctant to hear it, Scripture clearly puts forth the story of a fragile and fleeting humanity. Jesus spoke readily of his own death and wept at the grave of a friend. The apostle Paul wrote of our bodies as "jars of clay," words hastening back the image of David who lamented that he had become like "broken pottery." Yet even well beyond the fragile images of humanity given in Scripture, the vulnerability of the incarnate Son comes into focus and redefines all of my own terms. The image of Christ on the Cross turns my understanding of fragileness on its head, challenges my discomfort with brokenness, and redirects my associations of weak and strong. In these images of Christ I’m discovering anew the vulnerability of God is far stronger than my greatest images of strength. In his cross journey, God uses the weak to shame the strong, a suffering Son to heal the wounds of creation, and the vulnerable image of a broken savior to show me the all-surpassing vessel who saves me.

During an hour or so this morning, with a dear friend, having a beagle, I once again, have confirmation that I am coming to a fresh understanding that my profession is that it is by the Cross which I live, by a seemingly weak vessel that I am brought home. Christ is not an escape raft for the hard realities of this world. On the contrary, he calls to me in my weakness and reminds me that it is not unfamiliar to him. Through tumultuous waters, he beckons me to see there is potential in frailness and weakness, meaning in affliction, and life beyond the journey that currently consumes me. Something like the image of tiny ducks arriving after an unlikely voyage, this year’s journey of Lent is one in which I’m allowing Christ to redirect my thoughts on vulnerability, the weak and the strong.  May I say to all my family, friends, and colleagues, that along the way, God is aware of every last and fragile vessel, going after even one that is lost, longing to gather us unto himself like a hen bringing together thousands of chicks under her wings.