Doing good should be its own reward but we humans love applause. I do!
A reflection by Danny Schweers for May 10, 2026.
Every week I write a short Christian meditation, select an engaging photograph, and email the pair to 300 friends and strangers. Yes, it is rewarding to write something inspiring and to create a memorable photo, but I am inordinately delighted when a dozen people immediately email me back saying how much they enjoyed what I sent them. I am especially pleased when they write something inspiring. Think of it as call and response. For example, last week I sent out the following Photo Prayer:
Moseying Monday at Bombay Hook
This day could be any day many millions of years past, hopefully many millions of years to come. Wild turkey, redwing blackbird, goldfinch, fiddler crab, starling, grackle, willet, canada goose, herring gull, great blue heron, great egret, mama fox and her kit, yellowjacket, annoying fly, biting mosquito and tick, trumpeter swan, tree swallow, turkey vulture, snapping turtle, cattle egret, mallard. Generation after generation they have survived and thrived in their diversity, each of them wholly dependent on whatever nature provides each day. I admire these creatures who live so precariously, so trustingly, but I thank God for my roof, bed, easy chair, refrigerator, stove, microwave, computer, television, automobile, and phone. On my shelves, hundreds of books.
Am I unnatural?
Photo of a trumpeter swan at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, April 27, 2026. Trumpeter swans are the heaviest living bird native to North America. Photo Prayer 2026-12; photo and text copyright 2026 by Danny Nelson Schweers.
In response to the above Photo Prayer, I got eight emails in reply. It is one of those responses I want to share with you, a poem by Bob Cox that took what I had written and made it into poetry. I am impressed and hope you are as well.
One Creation
a poem by Bob Cox
I stand at the pond’s edge.
A trumpeter swan drifts across its surface
with the kind of calm that makes a person
aware of unnecessary furniture.
This day,
could be borrowed from a million years ago,
or slipped forward, unopened,
into a future where wings still write
their cursive signatures across the sky.
There they are,
Your parishioners without pews:
a wild turkey scratching its sermon into the dirt,
a blackbird flashing its epaulets
like a minor prophet,
a goldfinch stitching yellow light into the air,
a fiddler crab waving its single oversized claw
as if hailing a passing miracle.
Even the less beloved congregation,
the yellowjacket with its quick temper,
the housefly rehearsing annoyance,
the mosquito and the tick,
tiny reminders that not all psalms are pleasant,
they, too, take what the day hands them
and ask for nothing more.
While I count my blessings
like a shopkeeper at closing:
roof, bed, easy chair,
the obedient hum of appliances,
the glowing catechism of screens,
the faithful automobile waiting for my key,
my phone, the oracle of distraction.
And the books,
hundreds of them,
spines aligned like a well-behaved choir,
each one promising a world
that does not require me to step outside.
So here is my prayer:
Am I Your unique creation, Lord,
to sit so comfortably
while the heron stands in cold water,
while the goose navigates an invisible map,
while the turtle carries ancient patience
through mud and time?
Or am I simply another creature
of a different habitat,
one lined with drywall and Wi-Fi,
one that trusts not the marsh or tide
but the quiet click of a thermostat?
Teach me, if You will,
to live somewhere
between the swan’s reflection
and my own in the darkened screen,
to hold gratitude for interdependence,
to feel the thin thread that ties my breath
to theirs.
If I cannot surrender my chair,
or silence my machines,
at least let me look up now and then,
long enough to see the swan glide past
as if it knows something
I have spent my whole life
trying not to need.
Bob Cox
1 May 2026
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Reflection 2026-07 by Danny Nelson Schweers. Danny chairs SsAM’s Communication Committee. He is an active photographer and writer. Click here to visit his website and make a comment.
