APRIL 4, 2005

ROADKILL, PESTS AND FOOD
by Pastor George Van Alstine

I saw a dead squirrel in the road today. Its losing race with a car must have happened just a couple of hours earlier, because its fur still moved with the breeze in a lifelike way. Yet, it was dead—just roadkill.

My biology-lab mind took over, and I reflected on the fact that the squirrel had a brain resembling mine in its structure and function. We also shared the same basic body structure—a skeleton with similar bone connections, two eyes, two ears, four limbs. Our internal organs all functioned in very much the same way—lungs, heart, intestines, kidneys. He had advantages over me front and rear, hair on his head and a long bushy tail. But this roadkill and I had more in common than we had differences between us.

A little later in the day I swatted a mosquito. Just a bug that was bothering me, but I couldn’t stop my mind from seeing my biology-textbook diagram of an insect’s innards. There were all the same basic organ systems—digestion, circulation, excretion, reproduction. Most striking was the fact that my deceased bug acquaintance had a heart and a brain, the two organs closest to defining where a human person lives. All this complexity within the tiny critter I had casually killed as a pest.

I put these thoughts aside to enjoy my lunch. It was while I was chewing my first bite of hamburger that it occurred to me that the protein I was eating had a few weeks before been a cud-chewing heifer pushing and shoving other cattle for space at a feeding trough. This cow that was in the process of becoming part of me had also shared the same body design—eyes, stomach, hair, liver, tongue, toenails. And there were those two intimate organs again, brain and heart.

The psalmist wrote of himself, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). He could just as easily have said this of a squirrel, or a mosquito, or a cow. Each one is just as much a miracle of design and function from the creative mind of God. Why are they roadkill, or pests, or food, while I am so much more special?

As I thought about this, I came to three conclusions:

• In the overall functioning of the universe, I am no better than these animals. Without God’s grace, I am roadkill, or a pest to be swatted by a larger creature, maybe by God himself, or food somewhere in the middle of a food chain. This is a humbling thought.
• Because of a difference decreed by God, I have been created in his own image. This means that there is a great gulf between these other animals and me, in spite of our biological similarities. This is an enabling thought.
• It’s very, very sad that the history of Western thought has created such a gulf between science and religion. Each field of truth wants the other to bow to it. Actually, there is only one truth, and religion and science are two ways of approaching it. If the two reviewed my biology facts without animosity, they could teach each other a great deal. Religion could shed light on the spiritual realities behind roadkill and pests and food and the image of God. Science could show religion the wonder of the fact that God used the same basic design in all his animal creatures and what that implies about how he relates to his universe.

Just some musings on dead things, the continuity of all life, and the awesomeness of God.