I have the opportunity of studying wild turkeys from my living room window.  Two family groups combined last fall to form a flock of 31 that pecked, scratched, and fed both above and below the house for several months.

Benjamin Franklin pushed to have the wild turkey declared the national bird, but that honor went to the bald eagle instead.

I’m glad.  The turkey isn’t a very impressive bird when you get to know it.

In the first place, it isn’t particularly useful.  I’ve never eaten wild turkey, but I’m told that it’s very difficult to tenderize the meat enough to make it edible.  One recipe for cooking wild turkey calls for it to be roasted with a horseshoe.  When the horseshoe gets tender, you’re to throw the turkey out, and eat the horseshoe.

In the second place, turkeys are very messy.  My daughter in Idaho complains bitterly because turkeys have taken up residence on her lawn and porch during the winter.  Nothing will keep them away.  She has to shovel her walk and porch each day—not because of snow—but because of turkey droppings.

In the third place, turkeys are selfish bullies.  If a big turkey thinks that another turkey has a better place to scratch and to eat, he makes a rush at that turkey and takes over the spot.  A group of feeding turkeys is, therefore, in constant motion as one turkey and then another displaces its companions.

In the fourth place, turkeys are not smart.  The simplest problems are impossible for a turkey brain to work out.  Many is the time that I’ve watched a lone turkey, or a group, trying to get through a fence so that it can be with the flock.  The group that has become separated from the rest will pace up and down the fence for hours looking for a way to get through when all that is necessary is to flap their wings and fly over.  A turkey will only resort to flight when flying up to roost for the night, or in a dire emergency.  Even in an emergency it may still choose to run rather than fly.  It is thus sometimes possible to chase a wild turkey into a corner and catch it.

In recent years it has become customary to refer to ignorant people as “turkeys.”  If someone says, “You turkey!” he’s not issuing a compliment.

As I’ve observed turkeys and people I see many similarities.  I see many selfish people.  Many don’t marry, and refuse to be shackled by children.  When they do marry, they often divorce.  The root cause of all divorces is selfishness.  Selfishness also breeds bullies.

I see many people figuratively pacing the fence lines trying to figure out how to extract themselves from the traps and hard places they’ve gotten themselves into.  All they’d have to do is to look up and take flight, but they refuse to do so.  Every one of their pains and sins has already been paid for through unimaginable suffering borne by their Savior in their behalf, yet they refuse to look up or to even acknowledge Him.

Those who make the choice to repent of their sins and to follow their Redeemer by keeping His commandments find their thoughts, emotions, potentialities, knowledge, relationships, talents, and joy literally taking flight.

I find myself in sorrow for those who refuse to look up.  There is so much that I’d like to tell them if they’d listen.  The gospel of Jesus Christ magnifies every righteous desire, emotion, and relationship.

Many people embrace the thinking and philosophy made popular by Charles Darwin who spent his lifetime trying to prove that physical laws act independently and at random.  He rejected the idea of an overriding power or Creator at work in our world and universe.  In his autobiography he made this astounding statement:

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years.  Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays.  I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight.  But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry:  I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.  I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music...This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies and travels...interest me as much as ever they did.  My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive...Perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could...have been kept active through use.  The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”  (The Autobiography of  Charles Darwin, 138-39).

What a sad statement!

Those who refuse to look up are turkeys.

Those who refuse to acknowledge their Redeemer and the suffering He made in their behalf are doomed to do their own suffering.

The Savior says in D&C 19:15-19:

“Therefore I command you to repent—repent, lest I smite you by the rod of my mouth, and by my wrath, and by my anger, and your sufferings be sore—how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not.

“For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent;

“But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I;

“Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—

“Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.”

If we will look to the Savior, and accept His Atonement we won’t have to suffer.  Our sins have already been paid for by One who did no sin.

We need not be turkeys.