Job 42:7-17
Last weekend, we had the opportunity to visit the Calgary Zoo. It was a great time of appreciating God’s creative ability in the animal kingdom. When you go to a zoo, your basic expectation is to see animals that are wild or unusual to Canada. A lot of times you see the animals sleeping. So if you see a wakened animal doing stuff that’s a bonus. Well last weekend, we got a surprising show from an animal. And it was not a show prompted by a zookeeper or some food. It was the animal just being itself in an amazing way.
Here she is. We don’t actually know her name but we called her Hilda Hippo. In the Africa pavilion they have giraffes and hippos. The giraffes were eating the trees the zookeepers put up for them. Hilda decided to go swimming. But she didn’t just swim. She did multiple underwater back flips right in front of crowd. So she would swim towards the glass. Then she would plant her feet right against the glass to get a foundation from which to push. Here she pushes her three or four thousand pounds backwards.
It was amazing to see the reaction of people when they first saw Hilda do this. We sat there for quite a while. Lots of kids and parents gathered in the viewing theatre. But then new people would wander in. The first time they saw Hilda flip backwards even the adults would point and oooh or aah or scream. Here’s Hilda giving me her death stare just before she goes for her next back flip. That was the highlight of our zoo visit – not Hilda’s death stare but Hilda. It was memorable because it was surprising and unexpected.
Now the same thing can happen when it comes to movies or books or stories. You go on through the book or the movie and come up with your expectations on how the story ends. But sometimes, stories have surprise endings like in the film “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” where Luke discovers that the evil Darth Vader is actually his father. Or in the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an investigator tries to determine the identity of these two very different men. The story ends with his discovery that they are the same person.
Well today we come to the end of the story of Job.
