A PRAYER FOR THE BIRDS
Dear Lord,
I want to thank You for
giving us our feathered friends. They provide us with so much pleasure
over the years. They all have such different calls. One of my
favorites is the Phoebe. It was the bird whose call I was first able to
recognize. Its distinctive, "fee-bee, fee-bee," makes it
sound like it is celebrating its name for all the world to know. In fact,
when You think about it, its name was given to it due to its call, so it
really named itself.
I love the little chickadee, the
state bird of both Maine and Massachusetts. It is so friendly it often
will land on the feeder just as I am drawing my hand back. Whenever I hear
a great chatter outside my window I know the feeder is empty. They are
always quick to remind me to fill it. I hope they appreciate that whenever
I carry one of those 50 pound sacks into the house from the car I almost
get a hernia.
I enjoy the nuthatches, too.
The little children are fascinated to learn that they are more adept than the
woodpecker. Describing how the woodpeckers can only walk on tree bark from
down to up, and that the nuthatches can go in either direction always
brings smiles to children's faces.
One only has to listen how quiet the
woods are at night, while the birds are sleeping, to gain an
appreciation of how dull the woods would be in daylight without
them. Woods music with only the wind in the leaves would be drab if not
for the feathered chorus harmonizing with it.
I remember reading in the Readers
Digest some years ago about an experiment done in a planetarium. A large
number of birds were placed on perches. Special projectors provided a view
of a night sky complete with stars on the domed ceiling. All the birds
were facing the same way on their perches. Then, the projectors were
slowly rotated 180 degrees. A moment later all the birds turned on their
perches and faced the other way. It is wonderful how You have educated
your feathered children through their genes. They come into this world
with an instinctive scientific knowledge that would take people many hours of
hard work to acquire. Hearing about this phenomenon leaves children wide-eyed in
awe.
I don't mean to sound critical, so please don't take this the wrong way. I have noticed that the birds don't
seem to have a very good knowledge when it comes to the environment. I
have a number of nice plantings of flowers around the
house. When the birds crack open the shells of the black oil
sunflower seeds they drop the shells right onto the path below. The flower
beds are only a few feet away. If they could just drop them in among the
flowers they could return all those minerals back into the soil.
Then there is also the matter of the
bird poop. They seem to think my green minivan looks better with the white
spots in it. It really doesn't, honestly. If you could just send the
Holy Spirit down to improve either their attitude or their aim I would be most
grateful. Thank You. Amen.
Jack Murphy