Friends,

Years ago, I watched the most bizarre and fascinating documentary on YouTube about avocados and ancient giant ground sloths. Apparently, avocados once relied on giant sloths to spread their seeds, after all, the animal would need to be massive to digest and spread the seeds. They went on to say that avocados would have been doomed to extinction if humans had not swept in to cultivate the plants, spreading the seeds in the process. There’s one slight problem with this; THEY WERE TOTALLY WRONG!!

The producers of SciShow generally cite academic sources to back up their conclusions, and I had no reason not to believe them, until they recently published another video explaining how they were totally wrong about the whole thing. Apparently, someone mentioned in an academic paper decades ago that it could have been giant sloths that scattered avocado seeds, but there was never any proof of this. The idea was so interesting that people started talking about it as if it were fact and not just the fanciful musings of the author, and suddenly, the general consensus is this avocado/sloth partnership is canon, culminating in this wonderful short video chronically

You’d think that if producing a scientifically backed show would have led the creators to shy away from admitting and even highlighting a seemingly embarrassing mistake. Afterall, the whole reason I watch the show is because I know that they are way smarter than me about this stuff and I trust them. Wouldn’t this have been disastrous for them? From my perspective, it was quite the opposite. The episode about their sloth avocado love affair error, how they came to the conclusion in the first place, and realizing their error was more interesting than the original video, and it made me trust them that much more.

It takes a certain amount of vulnerability to admit a mistake. I have a hard time admitting my errors to myself, let alone announcing it to the world. I imagine it would have taken quite a bit of courage to make that video, when letting it go would have been so much easier and I would have been none the wiser. It takes a certain amount of spiritual work to get to that conclusion. You and I will carry out all sorts of egregious errors while we strive to work side by side, and the times we come to terms with our errors and confess them to each other will be sacred, but rare occasions. We are students of the truth, but not masters over it. I am ok with the fact that we may live in disagreement, and that some things may not get resolved. However, I suspect the world would be a lot more trustworthy, meaningful, productive and downright interesting if we got better at admitting our mistakes.

Scripture tells us repeatedly to trust in God and not the will of humans (i.e. Psalm 118:8-10), yet here we are, only knowing human will, because we are just human. The ask sounds simple, and it makes perfect sense, but if you think about it, it is nearly impossible. Or maybe, it is so unbelievably simple, it is impossible not to do. We don’t know why gravity works, but it works anyways. Every step we take is a leap of faith that the world God created for us will not fail us. We just do it so often, that we can fool ourselves into thinking it is mundane. With things infinitely more simple than gravity, like vestry meetings, politics, and the correct method of cooking a steak, we can generate all sort of disagreements and conflict, because we actually have something to say. Our collective consciousness exists in the tiny sliver between what is so simple that its truth is apparent, and what is beyond our understanding. In that tiny sliver exists all our concerns, cares, imagination, conflict and existence, but God exists throughout. We must trust God in everything and have no problem doing so in the things that go so far beyond what we can understand, but in that tiny sliver we dig in our heals, double down on beloved falsehoods, and structure our lives so we do not have to be contradicted.

For our Church to thrive we do not need to agree on everything, but we must trust in God more than we trust in ourselves, which means that we all must be wrong on occasion. This is nothing that should be guilt inducing or painful, but rather an invitation into something more interesting.

Despite the lack of peer-reviewed academic papers on the matter, I hope that the giant ground sloths of South America really did enjoy avocados.

Blessings,

Nick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpcBgYYFS8o