I walked past a blooming bush and could hear hundreds of bees buzzing about from blossom to blossom. I walked under a blooming tree and heard thousands of bees busily gathering nectar from the blossoms.
I enjoy honey and sometimes reflect, as I savor the sweetness on my toast or cereal, of the thousands of bees working over many days and flying who knows how many miles from blossom to blossom and blossoms to hive so that I can have a small jar of honey from which I sweeten my breakfast. No individual bee gets all the credit; it takes a whole hive of bees to make it happen.
Bees are social insects. They need each other to survive and must work together to produce honey and to survive. If a bee flies into a moving car and manages to exit the car several miles down the road, far from its hive, it will soon die. There are no independently living bees!
We humans are more like bees than we sometimes realize; God has also designed us to need each other. We can mess up this plan of God’s by either rejecting help from others or by resisting giving help to others.
An old African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” We all need each other, not just to raise children but to do virtually anything and everything. We are always standing on the shoulders of others to grasp beyond our reach, and they on our shoulders. We’re called by God to exhibit humility by accepting help from others and to express love by giving help to others. It’s a give and take proposition that makes life work.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
Blog 