Put up for adoption. Rejected at every turn. Denied the comfort of home and hearth. It’s not easy being a homeless goose these days.

            Such is the life of Herbert, the baby gosling nobody wants. Purchased from a local feed store, Herbert was intended as a birthday gift for a teenage girl who has never shown the slightest indication she had aviary interests. Why giving her a goose seemed like a good idea to my 16-year-old son is anybody’s guess. It certainly didn’t seem like a good idea to the birthday girl, setting up yet another rejection for Herbert and a dilemma for me. 

            After adding a potbellied pig to the family at Christmas, we emphatically declared (again) that we would accept no more pets, yet in an unexpected and unauthorized twist I came home to find a baby goose swimming in my bathtub. I admit, that is a hard picture to resist, but resist I did. First I tried to reason with the five teenagers in our house who had each already bonded with Herbert. 

            “Number one,” I began authoritatively, “dogs and cats, of which we have seven, eat baby birds.”

            I was quickly interrupted with a demonstration to prove me wrong as Herbert was offered up to each dog who either licked it affectionately or turned tail and went the other way. 

            “Secondly,” I continued undaunted, “we have no place to keep it. It absolutely cannot live in my bathtub, or anywhere in the house.”

            “We’re going to keep him in the extra bird cage for now, so he can live on the porch.”

            “And finally, it isn’t fair to Herbert. He needs duck company. He won’t be happy here.”

            That assertion Herbert himself seemed determined to contradict. He appeared quite content with his new flock, following the kids’ every step and chirping until picked up and cuddled. Like the ugly duckling in the story, he didn’t seem to notice that he was different from everyone else. He just wanted friends.

            I needed a new argument, so I got online to find out what reputation geese have as pets. Let’s just say that if geese were people, Herbert’s name would be Mike Tyson. To quote one former goose owner, “They are loud, mean pooping machines.” I shared this information with the kids, but they insisted that Herbert is different, even though all evidence is to the contrary. Already our fine feathered friend pecks aggressively at the hands the feed him, yet the kids believe our goose will be the exception to the rule. 

            Outwardly resigned to letting them try to reform Herbert, I secretly began to hatch a plot to relocate him to a more suitable environment. Counting on the adage, “birds of a feather flock together,” I suggested an outing for young Herbert. 

            “Take him up to the pond at the college park and let him swim around for a while. He’ll enjoy getting out of the cage and making friends with his own kind.”

            “But what if he won’t come back to us?” they asked with genuine concern.

            “That won’t happen,” is what I said, but what I was counting on was the call of the nature wooing Herbert into the wild where he belonged.

            Nature did not woo Herbert; it scared him to death. Herbert is currently in a kiddy pool in our backyard enjoying chlorinated water while commanding an audience of dogs, cats and kids. 

            Unlike Herbert, most of us are not comfortable in groups that don’t look like us. That may be especially true for Christians. Succumbing to the natural law of attraction, we huddle together with like minded folks forgetting that the church is supposed to be Christ's hands, feet and voice, to carry out his plans in the world. God intends that “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known” where it is needed most, outside our holy huddles.  Ephesians 3:10 

            The call of Jesus Christ is for his flock to go out into the world and proclaim his name. That, dear friends, is how His flock grows.