Fastballs and Birds

(I wrote this just last week when I was feeling sorry for myself. The birds helped me to remember.)

It is green out now. Spring has sprung. The sun is warm during the day and the air is cool at night making perfect sleeping weather. There are a million birds in the backyard singing their praise. They whistle and chirp. They search all day for their food. They rest. And in the morning, before the dawn, they start their singing all over again. They have no sense about them. “Stupid” they are called by the intelligent of the intelligent. All those birds do is sing and worship. What a waste of such fine talent. They could be making millions recording records and selling them to a salivating public. They waste their talents in a pathetically dreary backyard in a pathetically boring town on the lake. Only a few ears hear their songs. They could be singing in a zoo or at an opera house or in a small suburb. But they choose obscurity—a place where the yard is safe, the food is plentiful, and the trees are tall. Silly birds. If only they knew what was out there—beyond this world they have chosen to nest in. Here the only danger they face is from a cat that is too fat to chase them up a tree and too heavy stepped to sneak up behind them from the grass. “Pounce” is no option for the cat; flying is always an option for birds.

I can hear those birds singing. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. But I have no right to silence those birds. They are not singing for me. Furthermore, the birds have no more right to ask the bird-maker to make them into something else than the clay has a right to say to the Potter ‘make me something else.’ The Bird-maker makes the birds the color He wants, He gives them a voice that He wants to hear, they live where He chooses for them to live. Birds. Who would’ve thought that birds would be so important? Yet not one of them, not one, falls to the ground apart from His knowledge. Who would’ve thought that birds could hold such a special place in the eyes of the Maker? Am I less important than a bird? Am I any less created than a bird? Did not the Bird-Maker also form me with as much care as He did the bird? Birds! Who would’ve ever thought that a handful of feathers could be so valuable to the Maker? Who would’ve ever thought that the Creator of the universe could weep a single tear because a bird falls to the ground or is embedded in the grill of a Red Chevy Chevette, or is pulverized by a Randy Johnson fastball? I hope in my moments of misery and self-centered wheezing the birds sing all the louder. Sometimes when we are too introspective we do not hear the birds singing, we don’t listen, but they do not stop. I hope they do not stop for a moment. Even though the birds do not sing for me they remind me that God is good and that if the birds are significant enough, and do not complain but sing, then perhaps I should not do less. God forgive me please.