The ultimate survival kit

I consulted my copy of "American Ornithology" and found the blazer-clad bird was among a family of birds noted for selling prime nesting sites at highly inflated prices.

I shouted out the door that the two were being swindled and they might want to consider a time-share. The one in the blazer tweeted something, which if I could have translated I would have known meant, "Time-share? How many nesting seasons do you think we have, Einstein?"

Then my neighbor called to see if I was okay. Funny that my neighbors never come by for visits any more.

It’s strange to see birds nesting this time of year. Shouldn’t they be sunning on the beach in Palm Springs? And shouldn’t we be digging out of the snow each morning? Scraping our windshields, checking the weather report for the drive home, dreading the high heating bill?

I miss the feeling I get when I arrive home from work on a cold, snowy day. I miss Saturday morning blizzards. I miss the normalcy of the seasons, knowing that the winter moisture will feed farmers what they need to get through the next season.

It’s been a creepy winter, if you know what I mean. Climate changes have left entire civilizations packing up and hitting the road. Are we of Southwest Kansas suddenly going to find ourselves an immense line of humanity -- High Plains refugees trudging toward the Dakotas and greener pastures?

Will historians hundreds of years from now study the "mysterious Kansans," and debate the theories surrounding their sudden disappearance? Will today’s grain elevator be tomorrow’s Stonehenge?

We can’t deny that catastrophic changes can occur that will alter our future, and our future’s future. Just ask the dinosaurs. They were minding their own business when … boom. Suddenly they’re history and all these hairy little creatures calling themselves "mammals" are running around as if they own the place.

Mammals did okay for themselves for several million years until that fateful day when an ape-like creature suddenly decided how nice it would be to stand up straight for a change. This, in turn, compelled God to peer downward and see that his prehistoric stew was just about finished, and that it was time to sprinkle in a little humanity. He separated human beings from animals by giving them two things: a soul and a shave. You might argue that God also gave humanity intelligence. Personally, I think we’re still waiting on that one.

Humankind was very prolific. Over the millennia we grew and learned and advanced and managed to populate nearly every land mass. We created weapons for survival, television for entertainment, and Poptarts for breakfast. We went from a couple of channels to a couple of hundred. We went from cavemen to Captain Kirk.

And the changes keep comin’.

Mother Nature certainly is responsible for the more catastrophic changes this globe has endured: the shifting of the tectonic plates; the slow demise of the ice age; the formation of the Rocky Mountains; and chapped, dry lips.

They are the changes that leave us wondering whatever happened to the dinosaurs, the Druids, my cousin Ed. (For most creatures, evolution consists of millions of years of mutation, natural selection and gene flow. For Ed, it happened during the second commercial break of the Beverly Hillbillies. One minute he was watching TV, the next he had a head the size of a beach ball and could levitate his Cheetos. At least that’s what he told me on the phone last night. )

They are the changes that leave us looking up to God and asking, "Are these 85 degree March days just a one-time thing? Or are you planning on making it a habit? The birds and I would really like to know."

And if it isn’t enough that Mother Nature is being difficult, human beings have committed a few catastrophic changes themselves. We had world wars and the H-bomb. We had 9-11. And after all these lessons, humanity still fails to grasp Jesus’ simple message of peace.

The good news is, Christ brought us the ultimate survivors’ kit. To survive any change, whether caused by Mother Nature or each other, we need only check the instruction manual now and then.