A Matter of Acceptance or Ignorance?

There’s this hill I climb on my morning walks. It’s a graceful climb that offers a stunning view of the city and the river beyond, if you come around the backside of the climb. But if you tackle the hill at the frontside of the walk, the perspective changes and the entire landscape is lost to irrigation pipes, rock-chip roads and gray-sided houses.

It’s all about purpose, of course. If the idea is to strengthen one’s muscles, to increase one’s heart rate, to fit into a certain pair of pants, one might want to forgo the view altogether and just trudge up the hill, nose to the pavement as it were.

I will never be a speed-walker.

My friend Stacey once told her husband that I walked just like him. Stacey’s idea of a walk — I don’t care how fit you are — is more like the Bataan Death March.

What Stacey meant is that I walk more like C.S. Lewis strolling Addison’s Walk.

I meander.

I mosey.

I stop when something catches my interest.

Like the animals above.

I passed them this morning on the downhill side of the climb. I noticed the miniature horses at first.  Then that sheep, looking so majestic and curious.

Goats were there, out of the screen shot, and the blonde horse, too busy grazing to speak.

What struck me about them is that they were all in the same gated community, doing their own thing, seemingly unfettered by the fact that each one was different from the other.

Do you think the blonde horse ever looks at the miniature horses and questions God about why He didn’t make her more petite? Or that the majestic sheep ever looks at her neighbors and thanks Creator that she’s not a goat?

How is it that these seemingly unrelated species, who are neither college-educated nor adherents to any particular doctrinal creed, know how to get along well enough to live in community with one another?

Is it a matter of acceptance?

Or ignorance?

Or something else altogether?