Ducks

“Two ducks in front of a duck,” said my father, “two ducks behind a duck, and a duck in the middle.  How many ducks?”  That little conundrum from nearly fifty years ago is as puzzling now as it was then.  The answer is, of course, three: but in order to fit, the ducks have to be swimming in a straight line.  To quote a favourite phrase of one of my former bosses, “all the ducks have to be in a row”.

It was to have been a farewell meal.  My friend had been planning to move to another part of the country, but now she explained that her plans had rather fallen apart.  She had a new job lined up, but suddenly her new employer wanted her to start in two weeks time instead of a month, in other words before she could make all the arrangements to move house.  Initially, she had difficulty finding a tenant for her flat, and then, when a likely occupant did arrive on her doorstep, he insisted on being able to move in within a week, which wouldn’t give her solicitor time to draw up a contract, let alone allow her to find and secure a new home some distance away.

In effect, my friend faced the daunting prospect of withdrawing from her new job, staying put for the time being, and starting the whole process again from scratch.  It was probably not over-helpful for me to recite to her, “You didn’t have all your ducks in a row.”  “My ducks,” she replied ruefully, “seem to be swimming all over the place!”

Life seems to be like that for some of us, doesn’t it?  I call it the 'polythene bag syndrome': you flatten one corner, only to discover that the air has formed an annoying bubble somewhere else.  No sooner do we get one bit of life sorted out, than something else goes wrong, or urgently distracts us from what we feel we ought to be doing.  There never seems to be a point where we can say that all is as it should be, and life can be lived ‘properly’.  What’s wrong, then?  Is life not meant to run smoothly? – or do we simply try to cram more into it than it is designed to accommodate?  I suspect that we see someone else’s achievement and think we can do the same, without appreciating the sacrifices he or she has had to make to get there; the problems that are being dealt with behind the scenes.  We think we can have the same success, and combine it with all of our existing interests, not realising that these other things don’t clutter the life of our idol.

Perhaps it would help if we were to focus on the most important things, and let everything else just fall into place.  The writer to Hebrews advised ‘fix your thoughts on Jesus’ (Heb. 3:1); and in the Gospel we find Jesus himself teaching us to seek first the Kingdom of God (Matt. 6:33), and everything else would be given to us.  Or, as the Ned Miller song of the 1960’s almost put it, “Give [God] your love and all of your life, and do what you do do well.”