Flora and fauna of the African wilderness declare the glory of an extravagant God. He's a God who causes fuschia flowers to pop out of the tops of plants that look like ordinary leafless sticks.

He crowns the Secretary bird with a prissy tuft of feathers. He stamps the zebra with striped patterns as unique as a thumb print.

I sometimes want to remake God in my own image, efficient and practical. But there's nothing efficient about the way he delights in decorating parrots in shades of chartreuse or puts a goofy Dr. Seuss-like head at the top of a giraffe's elegant neck.

Yes he's efficient too - the guinea hen picking through the elephant scat reminds us that nothing is wasted in nature.

But you can't help noticing God the master creator showing off when you see the symmetry of a baobab tree or the grace of a Vervet monkey swinging from branches nearby.

I love efficiency and am driven to squeeze redundancy from my life. But I love the extravagance of a God who created exploding supernovas and the improbable dung beetles, a God of shooting stars and mitochondria.

It's through his extravagant flourishes that we know we're really loved and it's by emulating his extravagance that he best loves others through us.