A man sat on a...
Illustration
A man sat on a park bench next to a pond. He began to feed some of a bag of popcorn to a beautiful mallard drake that swam in the pond. When the bag was nearly half gone, the mallard said, "You remind me of the way I myself was when young. We ducklings waddled where we pleased, Mother clucking her disapproval all the time. We couldn't understand a thing she said, and she never understood us. We would eat little fish; she'd turn up her nose. She'd offer us a worm and we'd run for the water. She'd stop at the edge of a puddle and watch us swim in it, a frantic look on her face. She nearly had a heart attack when we'd stand on our heads in the water. But we'd struggle out of the water, muddy and sticky, and she'd always be there to dry us off and warm us up and protect us the best way she knew how. When I got older, I came to appreciate the monumental task it must have been, a mother HEN raising a brood of ducklings she'd hatched by mistake. "You see, she loved us, so she did all she could for us, even when we made it hard for her. In the end we were better for it. We really knew how great love can be." The duck swam away. Finishing the popcorn, the man thought about love, how much he had received, how ungrateful he had been. Toward people. Toward God.
-- Mosley
-- Mosley
