What if....?

So after my Super Bowl of Birding Team, the Wicked Pishahs, failed (miserably by my perhaps over-demanding estimation) to defend their championship over the weekend, missing out on the opportunity to again lift the crystal Great Blue Heron seen here, I got to thinking the inevitable what if...? I wondered, what if we had gone for owls in Essex? What if we had left more time for Newburyport? What if we tried harder for a vulture in Ipswich? You get the picture. It was a painful case of Monday morning quarterbacking.

One tiny consolation was that the month of January was not yet over and I had a list for the state for the month of 98 species, just two shy of the personal best I had set just last year (when my team won the Super Bowl...ouch). So I thought maybe I could up the record. So on the last day of the month I spent some cold minutes waiting out the Red-headed Woodpecker here in town. No look, but I heard it in the distance, so I got one species closer. The only good chance I had of getting to 101 was to search for owls before midnight. I gave the hardest one (screech owl) a shot and came up short, so I let my hopes go with it and went home. Then I started a whole new "what if" game. What if that large black bird over the reservoir a couple weeks ago was a raven? What if I count the murre we saw on the Super Bowl (but was it thick-billed or common?)?

In the end it didn't really matter, first of all because it wouldn't get me to the record I wanted, but mostly because it was just my personal birding and nothing all that critical. Not to mention that I was worrying about a past I couldn't change. How much of our lives do we spend considering alternate pasts that obviously can have no impact on the actual present, let alone the future? I realized that at some point I had to give up the "what ifs" and simply replace it with "so what?"

But I do want to hold on to one important use of "what if...?" I want to look to the future and continuously ask "what if...?" Faith demands the sort of optimism that can envision all sorts of wonderful future outcomes. What if the God who cares for the birds of the field actually does care even more so for me...and for you?