There are two basic types of ducks: dabblers and divers. The names describe the way that they feed, dabblers dabble and divers dive. Dabblers are the classic “puddle ducks,” mallards and black ducks for example. They can feed literally in a puddle because they eat emergent vegetation protruding above the water or within reach of their extended necks with their bottoms tipped skyward. These are ducks of the shallows. Divers are deep water birds. Like torpedoes they paddle along under the water to the vegetable or animal life present on the bottom of the lake or pond. There are more species of divers than dabblers, but they are less familiar to us because they are more migratory. They also don’t tend to come on shore to eat bread offered by humans. So there are scaup, goldeneyes, ring-necked ducks and mergansers that spend a few weeks a year on our ponds heading north or south.Diving seems to be the preferred strategy since there are other species such as grebes, loons, and cormorants that also dive. Logic would dictate the preference since there must naturally be more food in the expanses of the pond or lake than in the shallows, since there is more deep water than shallow water. In Luke 5, when Jesus calls Andrew, Peter, James and John, he first tells them to push their boats out into the deep water. There they let down their nets and they become so full of fish that they almost break! The lesson here is that the fish are not in the shallows. The moral of the story is that if you want to know the miraculous truths that God has in store for you then you must get into the deep water. You need to be a diver not a dabbler.
Sure, dabblers and divers are both necessary to exploit all the niches in the environment. But a diver afraid to go into deep water will starve to death competing with the dabblers in the shallow end. Life is too full of rich blessing to do nothing but dabble. Don’t you want to dive in deep and learn all that you can about God and more particularly what it is that God has in store for you? It will mean some scary moments of holding your breath and moving through dark and murky places…but don’t you think it is worth the risk?
