God and Nature Spring 2021
God Positioning System (GPS) |
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By Angie Cornwell
During World War I, a homing pigeon by the name of Cher Ami endured the pain of multiple injuries while carrying a desperate message to Allied forces, thereby saving the lives of almost 200 American men. Cher Ami completed a 25-minute, 25-mile flight back to the coop while being bombarded with gunfire.
For at least the past 5000 years, dating back to the ancient Persians (1), humans have used the homing pigeon, Columba livia, to carry messages. Although we have taken advantage of the abilities of the homing pigeon since ancient times, we are still struggling to fully understand the mechanisms by which these pigeons find their way home from completely unfamiliar surroundings. In the late 1950s, solar and magnetic cues were thought to be at least partly responsible. More recent evidence indicates that pigeons use different homing strategies depending on location. In familiar territory, pigeons can use visual landmarks to guide them home, and they may increase reliance on visual cues as their familiarity with the environment increases (2, 3). Airborne environmental odors from volatile chemicals such as monoterpenes from forests or trimethylbenzene from urban areas (3) and infrasonic, low-frequency signals (4) may also help with navigational direction. In addition, pigeons appear to be able to share route knowledge across consecutive generations, resulting in collective intelligence about flight paths over time (5).
During World War I, a homing pigeon by the name of Cher Ami endured the pain of multiple injuries while carrying a desperate message to Allied forces, thereby saving the lives of almost 200 American men. Cher Ami completed a 25-minute, 25-mile flight back to the coop while being bombarded with gunfire.
For at least the past 5000 years, dating back to the ancient Persians (1), humans have used the homing pigeon, Columba livia, to carry messages. Although we have taken advantage of the abilities of the homing pigeon since ancient times, we are still struggling to fully understand the mechanisms by which these pigeons find their way home from completely unfamiliar surroundings. In the late 1950s, solar and magnetic cues were thought to be at least partly responsible. More recent evidence indicates that pigeons use different homing strategies depending on location. In familiar territory, pigeons can use visual landmarks to guide them home, and they may increase reliance on visual cues as their familiarity with the environment increases (2, 3). Airborne environmental odors from volatile chemicals such as monoterpenes from forests or trimethylbenzene from urban areas (3) and infrasonic, low-frequency signals (4) may also help with navigational direction. In addition, pigeons appear to be able to share route knowledge across consecutive generations, resulting in collective intelligence about flight paths over time (5).
"God, in his mercy, has given us the ultimate navigational system..." |
I am humbled by this avian navigator because of my notorious ability to get lost even in familiar surroundings. Once in second grade, I was dropped off by the school bus on our street not very far from our house. I remember wandering up and down the street that day, trying desperately to find my home.
The invention of the global positioning system (GPS) allows a directionally challenged person like me to drive to places successfully with relatively low stress. Prior to the invention of this life-saving device, I had to buy paper maps and carefully plot my routes in advance to the most minute detail. My maps were ripped at the folded seams from heavy use and carefully patched together with clear tape. GPS made those paper maps outdated. As long as you keep following the friendly voice giving you step-by-step instructions, you can find your way to almost anywhere! You can even travel, as I did last summer, to Denver and back, a 6000-mile roundtrip! If, while following the GPS, you do not pay attention to road signs, you might have no idea where you are at any given time. You can even obliviously take wrong turns, and GPS will just re-route you to fix your errors. Because I do not have the good senses of the homing pigeon, I have come to rely on my GPS, even after living in the same area for nearly two decades.
As harmless as it may be to depend on these navigational devices to guide us as we move about on this earth, we can be led completely astray by the global positioning system of our earthly, fleshly desires. If we are not attentive, we can find ourselves being told what to do every moment of our day, and yet never have any sense of foreboding about where we are being led. The world fills us with instructions on how we should spend our time. Some of these instructions sound like wonderful advice! After all, how could recommendations like “watch this award-winning movie” or “listen to this popular song” be harmful to us? These directives sound like reasonable things to do, and almost no one would disagree with them because they are so satisfying to our fleshly bodies. In fact, we can spend our whole lives following the instructions of the world instead of following Jesus. We may never be aware that we are not aligned with His original design for us or know what it means to be made in His image. Without a God positioning system, we will never know if we have gotten off the path or are completely lost. We may never know who we truly are in Christ.
Just like I sometimes ignore my GPS when I believe I know a better way to get somewhere than the path it is taking me, I sometimes deliberately ignore the directions of my God positioning system when I want to be in the driver’s seat, directing my own path, pursuing my own desires. Sometimes I even turn off the God positioning system because I don’t want to hear His directions. Like Jonah, we all have moments where we navigate away from Nineveh, heading in the exact opposite direction, trying to get as far away as possible from where He wants us to be. And sometimes, we program in the wrong destination either intentionally or by mistake, and we find ourselves blindly following directions to the wrong place. Other times we steer the wrong way because we are on auto-pilot—without thinking, we find ourselves driving a particular way because we used to drive there a lot in the past, even if it isn’t the correct destination for the present. Just as the homing pigeon resists being taught to home to a new location, it is easy for us to slip back into the old habits of our sinful selves.
God, in his mercy, has given us the ultimate navigational system that will allow us to find our way back to Him no matter how lost we have been. In order for us to find our way back to His original plan, He gave us His Word, the Bible, as a trusted road map to follow! He sacrificed His one and only beloved Son on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins so that we would not remain lost, but instead be found. He gave us the Holy Spirit to guide us, and we can tune into the frequency of this God positioning system through constant prayer. Just as we can pinpoint our position on Earth using triangulation from three satellites, God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son, and the Holy Spirit can point out our spiritual position and help us navigate while we are here on earth toward an eternal home. We never need to be desperately lost, walking back and forth on a street, having no idea how to find the way home. We never need to be alone, struggling to figure out where we are or how to get to where we need to be.
And we don’t need to have special powers like the homing pigeon to find our way to Him. We only need the humility to recognize His grace and mercy, and the openness to surrender and follow Him. How wonderful it is that we can place our lives in God’s hands and trust Him unconditionally. How wonderful it is that we can call Him our Ultimate Cher Ami, our dearest and best friend. How wonderful it will be if we navigate obediently aligned with the mission He entrusted to us, and find ourselves after death, like Cher Ami, winning the prize of his commendation: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”
References
1. Southerland, A. 2017. Struggle to get mail on time has lasted more than 5,000 years – Part 1. AncientPages.com. July 13, 2017. https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/07/30/struggle-to-get-mail-on-time-has-lasted-more-than-5000-years-part-1/ date accessed 12-14-20
2. Martinho, A; Biro, D; Guilford, T; Gagliardo, A; Kacelnik, A. 2015. Assymetric visual input and route recapitulation in homing pigeons. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 282(1816).
3. Zannoni, N; Wikelski, M; Gagliardo, A; Raza, A; Kramer, S, Seghetti, C; Wang, N; Edtbauer, A; Williams, J. 2020. Identifying volatile organic compounds used for olfactory navigation by homing pigeons. Scientific Reports 10, 15879.
4. Hagstrum, JT. 2013. Atmospheric propagation modeling indicates homing pigeons use loft-specific infrasonic ‘map’ cues. The Journal of Experimental Biology 216:687-699.
5. Sasaki, T and Biro, D. 2017. Cumulative culture can emerge from collective intelligence in animal groups. Nature Communications 8:15049.
*Image of Cher Ami. Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Office, National Archives. 111-SC-93245.
Angie Cornwell has been teaching as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Gordon College since 2014. She teaches microbiology, molecular biology, medical biotechnology, animal biology, animal physiology, and senior seminar. She serves as the faculty mentor for the student chapter of the ASA as well as for Sigma Xi-The Scientific Honor Society. She is an active member of the Danvers Church of the Nazarene in Danvers, MA, and serves on the Board as well as the worship team.
The invention of the global positioning system (GPS) allows a directionally challenged person like me to drive to places successfully with relatively low stress. Prior to the invention of this life-saving device, I had to buy paper maps and carefully plot my routes in advance to the most minute detail. My maps were ripped at the folded seams from heavy use and carefully patched together with clear tape. GPS made those paper maps outdated. As long as you keep following the friendly voice giving you step-by-step instructions, you can find your way to almost anywhere! You can even travel, as I did last summer, to Denver and back, a 6000-mile roundtrip! If, while following the GPS, you do not pay attention to road signs, you might have no idea where you are at any given time. You can even obliviously take wrong turns, and GPS will just re-route you to fix your errors. Because I do not have the good senses of the homing pigeon, I have come to rely on my GPS, even after living in the same area for nearly two decades.
As harmless as it may be to depend on these navigational devices to guide us as we move about on this earth, we can be led completely astray by the global positioning system of our earthly, fleshly desires. If we are not attentive, we can find ourselves being told what to do every moment of our day, and yet never have any sense of foreboding about where we are being led. The world fills us with instructions on how we should spend our time. Some of these instructions sound like wonderful advice! After all, how could recommendations like “watch this award-winning movie” or “listen to this popular song” be harmful to us? These directives sound like reasonable things to do, and almost no one would disagree with them because they are so satisfying to our fleshly bodies. In fact, we can spend our whole lives following the instructions of the world instead of following Jesus. We may never be aware that we are not aligned with His original design for us or know what it means to be made in His image. Without a God positioning system, we will never know if we have gotten off the path or are completely lost. We may never know who we truly are in Christ.
Just like I sometimes ignore my GPS when I believe I know a better way to get somewhere than the path it is taking me, I sometimes deliberately ignore the directions of my God positioning system when I want to be in the driver’s seat, directing my own path, pursuing my own desires. Sometimes I even turn off the God positioning system because I don’t want to hear His directions. Like Jonah, we all have moments where we navigate away from Nineveh, heading in the exact opposite direction, trying to get as far away as possible from where He wants us to be. And sometimes, we program in the wrong destination either intentionally or by mistake, and we find ourselves blindly following directions to the wrong place. Other times we steer the wrong way because we are on auto-pilot—without thinking, we find ourselves driving a particular way because we used to drive there a lot in the past, even if it isn’t the correct destination for the present. Just as the homing pigeon resists being taught to home to a new location, it is easy for us to slip back into the old habits of our sinful selves.
God, in his mercy, has given us the ultimate navigational system that will allow us to find our way back to Him no matter how lost we have been. In order for us to find our way back to His original plan, He gave us His Word, the Bible, as a trusted road map to follow! He sacrificed His one and only beloved Son on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins so that we would not remain lost, but instead be found. He gave us the Holy Spirit to guide us, and we can tune into the frequency of this God positioning system through constant prayer. Just as we can pinpoint our position on Earth using triangulation from three satellites, God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son, and the Holy Spirit can point out our spiritual position and help us navigate while we are here on earth toward an eternal home. We never need to be desperately lost, walking back and forth on a street, having no idea how to find the way home. We never need to be alone, struggling to figure out where we are or how to get to where we need to be.
And we don’t need to have special powers like the homing pigeon to find our way to Him. We only need the humility to recognize His grace and mercy, and the openness to surrender and follow Him. How wonderful it is that we can place our lives in God’s hands and trust Him unconditionally. How wonderful it is that we can call Him our Ultimate Cher Ami, our dearest and best friend. How wonderful it will be if we navigate obediently aligned with the mission He entrusted to us, and find ourselves after death, like Cher Ami, winning the prize of his commendation: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”
References
1. Southerland, A. 2017. Struggle to get mail on time has lasted more than 5,000 years – Part 1. AncientPages.com. July 13, 2017. https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/07/30/struggle-to-get-mail-on-time-has-lasted-more-than-5000-years-part-1/ date accessed 12-14-20
2. Martinho, A; Biro, D; Guilford, T; Gagliardo, A; Kacelnik, A. 2015. Assymetric visual input and route recapitulation in homing pigeons. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 282(1816).
3. Zannoni, N; Wikelski, M; Gagliardo, A; Raza, A; Kramer, S, Seghetti, C; Wang, N; Edtbauer, A; Williams, J. 2020. Identifying volatile organic compounds used for olfactory navigation by homing pigeons. Scientific Reports 10, 15879.
4. Hagstrum, JT. 2013. Atmospheric propagation modeling indicates homing pigeons use loft-specific infrasonic ‘map’ cues. The Journal of Experimental Biology 216:687-699.
5. Sasaki, T and Biro, D. 2017. Cumulative culture can emerge from collective intelligence in animal groups. Nature Communications 8:15049.
*Image of Cher Ami. Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Office, National Archives. 111-SC-93245.
Angie Cornwell has been teaching as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Gordon College since 2014. She teaches microbiology, molecular biology, medical biotechnology, animal biology, animal physiology, and senior seminar. She serves as the faculty mentor for the student chapter of the ASA as well as for Sigma Xi-The Scientific Honor Society. She is an active member of the Danvers Church of the Nazarene in Danvers, MA, and serves on the Board as well as the worship team.