The Golden Feather
The wild turkey “bronze feather” is a beautiful feather. The “bronze” is actually a gold color in some of its tail feathers. It makes its shimmery gold color by mirrors that grow out from the barbs–the “feather strings”– growing out from the main clear shaft, the rachis. The “mirrors’ are very precisely made multi-layered mirrors which thicknesses are exact to millionths of an inch. Each barb string might have up to 1000 “mirrors” on it.
Imagine if you shined a flashlight on a mirror a friend is holding in a dark room. Wouldn’t it be a bit freaky if the light shining off the mirror hit the wall on the other side of the room was gold colored? This is exactly what is happening with this turkey feather.
How does this happen? It’s a bit strange!
White light is not actually white. There isn’t one speck of white in the universe. All white color is really rainbow-colored and your brain makes up the color white when it sees a specific kind of rainbow effect.
In a rainbow, whether a large one outside or one make by a prism, the colors in white light are gathered together so we can see them as separate colors. Before passing through a raindrop or a glass prism, the individual light rays of different colors of light are intermixed, like when you mix salt and pepper. When individual light rays of different colors are intermixed enough, your eyes detect them as all mixed together and your brain screams, “White!” But there is no white. Your brain is fragrantly lying to you. It should be yelling “Intermixed colors!” Weird, huh?!
As strange as it is, it’s true: ALL white light in the universe is made of very mixed-up sunlight colors. There is no white light anywhere! Your teeth are really rainbow-colored, so are the whites of your eyes. So are snow flakes, clouds, white paint, athletic socks, milk, underwear and paper.
I tend to think that God made it so our brains turn mixed-up colors into white to us so the world wouldn’t be a crazy plethora of color everywhere. Imagine seeing every cloud as a stunning rainbow of colors all day long. It’d be fun for a while, but exhausting to the eyeballs after not too long!
How thoughtful of God! ( I wonder where the coding for this is on our DNA?)
When the rainbow colors of the sun’s supposed white beams hit the tiny 100,000 nano-thin layered mirrors in the turkey bronze feather, these precisely built mirrors destroy red and blue light and proportions of other light colors. The result? The color of gold is created. Isn’t that astonishing? It’s called “thin-film interference.” Wild!
God knew exactly how to create this blessing in this amazing golden-striped feather that He wanted to give us. He actually took the time and thought to pull off a snazzy gold feather stripe for all the Mr.Wild Turkeys of the world.
Do you get the obvious connection? If God takes the effort to gold stripe His turkeys to bless you, then He wants to and knows how bless you and also how to create the blessings of words, gifts and actions He wants you to give to others.
You were never intended to live the incredible adventure of life or of pleasing God and helping and blessing others by yourself. God Himself wants to be your powerful source of blessing and He wants to make you adequate and effective in bringing His blessings to others.
You were never intended to do life on your own. God wants it to be way way more exciting and beautiful and special than any of us could bring about on our own. He can intercept a trip to the grocery store and pile on so much blessing that you are radiant, beaming with joy, with what He does. He can bring in wonder in the wildest ways and in the most unexpected moments.
God’s a wild one; you never know what He’s going to do next or when He going to do it. I’m convinced He loves to surprise us with wild surprises. I have a hunch that He caught the disciples completely by surprise when a 30-foot from shore toss of the nets brought in more fish than they’d ever caught in their lives!
The goal is to walk with Him in the casual hours of our days let Him bring His surprises whenever He wants. Like me, you’re probably a bit on the side of, “Bring it on, Lord!”
"For the LORD God is a sun and shield; The LORD gives grace and glory; No good thing will He withhold From those who walk uprightly." - Psalms 84:11
"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." - Ephesians 2:10
What God calls you to experience of His goodness, He will pour out for you. What God has called you to do, He will open the doors for you to begin. Just follow whole heartedly and be courageous to enter into His new things.
Don Miller
"…not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God." - 2 Corinthians 2:5
What God calls you to do, He will equip you to finish… and accomplish well.
Don Miller