DOWNRIGHT SYMBIOTIC!

 ‘Yellow-billed Oxpecker’ by Sergey Yeliseev 
        is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Did you know that ostriches and zebras are buddies?  What an unlikely pair!  They really look weird together.  Here’s an Ostrich that has great vision, but not great hearing and a lousy sense of smell, and a Zebra with a great sense of smell and hearing, but lousy eyesight.  PERFECT!   

They hang out together for protection, each warning the other of potential danger from predators. Especially lions on the hunt.  They have a symbiotic relationship, mutually beneficial to both the Ostrich and the Zebra! 

How about this one.  The crocodile and the Plover bird, another extremely unlikely pair.  When the croc needs his teeth cleaned, he doesn’t call a dental hygienist, he simply opens his mouth and waits for the Plover bird!  The Plover bird flies inside the crocodile’s mouth, scary!  Seems dangerous for the bird.  It flies in there to eat the meat stuck between the crocodile’s teeth.  This is very beneficial to the croc because food stuck in the mouth of a crocodile can cause infection.  

Another bird, the Oxpecker, is a grayish-brown African bird related to starlings.  It’s buddies with the water buffalo.  This bold bird knows it can get a free meal on the back of a water buffalo who are prone to ticks.  Ticks feed on the WB’s blood and can cause disease and anemia in large grazing animals.  The OP gets a meal and the WB gets cleaned of parasites! (See photo above.)

I think God is trying to get our attention with these wild and crazy examples of symbiotic relationships!  Didn’t God originally create a totally symbiotic world where everything He made was in a mutually beneficial relationship with everything else!  IN A PERFECT WORLD this would be the case.  No one or no thing would take advantage of anything. 

This is what I believe God is trying to reclaim in our broken world where the prince of the power of the air, the devil has messed things up.  He is TOTALLY ‘ANTI-SYMBIOTIC’!   He came to kill, steal and destroy.  To separate.  To take advantage of everyone and everything.   Jesus came to give us life so that we could once again live in a symbiotic relationship with Him and each other!  He instituted the Church, the Body of Christ.  Its description in the scriptures makes this clear.

1 Corinthians 12 asks you to think about your own body to help you understand how the Church, which is Christ’s body is supposed to function.  It is obvious when you think about your own body that we need the various parts to function and in fact are sorely aware of just how much we need each part when we lose or injure even a toe.  And all these parts, the hand and toe are in an obvious symbiotic relationship.   This scripture points this out clearly.  ‘The body is not made up of one part but of many.  Now if the foot should say, “because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body”.  We are all a part of the same body.  If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be.  The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you”, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.  Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.’ 

We are each totally unique with differing gifts and talents, but God ordained that we need each other and are meant to live (like the parts of our own bodies) in a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship with each other!!!!

THE DEVIL IS TOTALLY ANTI-SYMBIOTIC!  He is parasitical!  He ‘habitually relies on or exploits others’ (New Oxford dictionary definition).  He is the exact opposite of God!  

Take a simple yet profound lesson from the bible and the Book of Nature!  Live in a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship with God, the body of Christ and the people around you as He originally intended!  This is indeed the way we can fulfill Gods great commandments found in the book of Matthew 22:37-39 to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’