My drive home from church consists first of ten miles on a very twisting, curving road that is a nightmare in the winter months and can make you feel like you're on a terrific roller coaster when driving fast in the summer. There's rarely a stretch of road straight enough to help you avoid anything in your path. Potholes, the occasional plastic tumbleweed (otherwise known as the empty Walmart sack), and especially in these wild hills, animals are hard if not impossible to not hit with a resounding thud, clunk, or crash. I've been blessed so far in that I haven't taken any human or animal lives yet on this road (really praying that at least the former stays true). Not everyone is so lucky.
Sunday night I left the evening service a little late, but it was still very light out at 8:40pm. Cows and llamas dotted the mint-frosted hills in their usual chocolate sprinkle way, meandering slowly enough not to distract me too much as I followed the crumbled-edge pavement. About two miles down the road, I spotted what looked to be a medium-sized animal lying in my lane. When I approached closer, hitting the brakes, my eyes widened at what was really before me. There was an animal lying in its blood, clearly dead, but it was only a sparrow. What I had seen was a group of about ten more sparrows gathered around the fallen bird in a loose oval configuration.
I'm by no means an expert on sparrows, but I've never heard of or seen this phenomenon before. With their dark brown feathers and the first shadows of the night encroaching, the ring of creatures seemed to be mourning the loss of one of their own. Instantly I thought of Matthew 10:29, where God says He notices even the fall of a single sparrow. He was there, with those birds, and if animals have souls, then he was taking that little bird to Heaven with Him. Maybe it seems a little ludicrous, but the image of my Heavenly Father reaching down with his powerful and kind hands to escort a bird to the next life...it's so incredibly comforting to me. If He cares enough for sparrows to mourn each other, then how much must He care for even the smallest of my issues?
God knows everything that is going on in my life, even the things I don't see or understand. Not only does he know about all of these things, He *cares* about them. He's doing things about them, too. (A thought--ever think about what God's to-do list must look like? Mine seems so much more manageable now.) He's not going to leave me, lying on the side of the road, without help or sending someone to notice. God's got me. What more do I really need?
Oh, wow!! Remember how I told you the other day that I had something in the back of my mind that I was working on writing/illustrating? It's almost as if you took half of my story and wrote it for me! I'm still going to write it, but too bad you beat me to part of it! :)
ReplyDeleteGreat job by the way - this is truly something we all need to remember - God's got us all under his watchful care...