Blue Dragons

Philippians 2:1-2 -- "Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion,  then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind." 

Wide, wonderful, and weird is our blue planet and all the marvelous things God created to inhabit it. In fact, so vast is the blue part of this amazing place in which we live that we have yet to discover much of it. We know so very little of the ocean's depths and churning waters. It astounds me, really.

Wriggling to the top of my own "weird and wonderful" charts is the beautiful but lethal Blue Dragon. A Nudibranch - the behaviors of which are only just now being studied. In fact, this amazing sea slug is a relative new comer to the scientific community. It was only recently discovered that even more astonishing than it's seemingly delicate anatomy is the Blue Dragon's ruthless ability to stalk and feed on another blue but deadly beauty - the Blue Bottle jellyfish [aka: the Portuguese Man of War].

This little angelic looking and smallish sea slug stings if the conditions are right. And man, does it pack a punch! In fact, when an Australian woman was stung during a competitive swimming event, it was thought that the culprit was the Blue Bottle jellyfish. None could be found, however. Not anywhere. After hours and hours of searching for the hazard to the biathletes, a tiny floating blue and white creature was discovered - and the race to learn more about the Blue Dragon began.

Where did it live? How did it feed? How did it sting? Did it produce it's own venom and if so - how did it so closely resemble that of the infamous Portuguese Man of War?

Photos by Scott and Jeanette Johnson, from Kwajalein Underwater

So like The Portuguese Man of War is the Blue Dragon sting that the look and feel of them are very hard to distinguish from one another! And the treatment of such stings on a person's body is exactly the same.

And now we know why.

As it turns out, the Blue Dragon steals the sting of the Blue Bottle jellyfish as it feeds upon it, taking the little needle-like protrusions for its own defense. Pretty clever!


Which made me think ... how cool would it be if I were so Christ-like that people would find my actions and spirit difficult to distinguish from those of my Lord and Savior? The little Blue Dragon has exactly the right idea, does it not? Perhaps I can feed on the words of Jesus so much that I "leak" them out in my behavior. In my words. In my deeds. And even in my thoughts.

What an inspiration are you, little Blue Dragon. How mighty an example from so tiny a thing.