Rhino on the Treadmill

I saw this really cute picture on Matthew's T-shirt while the church fellows were watching the Manchester derby at the Queen and the Mangosteen.


All the clamor and busyness over writing the Honors Thesis has caused me to temporarily put aside plans for the music-based social movement that I've been dreaming about since late last year. And it's strange how God puts little reminders in one's life. I may not be hearing His voice as clearly in this season, but that doesn't mean He's stop communicating with me. Sometimes, as I'm reminded by Dominick, it's not in ways that I'm familiar with, or I'm looking out for.


I love this picture because the irony is so cutely displayed so as not to offend, but yet portraying a realistic side of humanity today. It's funny because unicorns don't exist, but rhinos do.

Most rhinos today don't realize (or even if they do they don't want to acknowledge it) that unicorns are simply white horses with a photoshopped appendage sticking out of their head. But they run so hard on the treadmill, longing to attain the slender white legs, shapely faces, athletic bodies that can be found on all the posters in the gym.

It's very hard to convince a rhino that God structured its body in such a way that it cannot be a horse (or a unicorn for that matter). Most rhinos take pride in the fact that their bodies look a little more "unicorn-like", be it with a shinier horn, slightly larger eyes, whitish skin etc. It comes across to them as strange that they should be valued for their strength, stability, toughness, and of course, their horn's medicinal properties (if any, really). Grace, beauty, speed, dexterity, those are the things they want but are unable to have.

Although I may be stepping on sensitive ground here, I feel that that it would be even more tragic if the rhino rejected someone who loved it as a rhino for another who keeps throwing insults at it for looking like a rhino when it's really because of a unicorn that he/she cannot have.



All in all, it's a beautiful picture. A logo that depicts a direction for the movement to come.







A hero is a man who's afraid to run away. -English Proverb

I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing. Yet what is due me is in the LORD's hand, and my reward is with my God. -Isaiah (Isaiah 49:4)