Prayer On The Wing.

Image © by Brian E. Faulkner

​Late one Sunday afternoon, during a pause between worrying about one thing then another, I flipped through a couple of Reddit pages and came upon a video that turned my low mood into one of such high delight that I had to watch it several times.
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It didn’t run much more than a minute.  There was no voice over, just video, some light ukulele music and a few titles in what looked like made-up words but could have been Dutch. 

Scene 1 was a grocery store shelf.  We see someone inspecting half a dozen or more small mottled bird eggs nested in a cardboard container wrapped with plastic.  Hands turn the package over, looking at it this way and that, as if saying, “Well, what do we have here …?”

Scene 2 finds the spotted eggs being placed in what appears to be a home-brew incubator.  Soon, one egg gives a little wiggle.  The shell breaks open, and two pink feet emerge (rather large ones compared to the size of the egg).   A soggy-looking brown chick then makes its way into the world, where a man cups it in his hands.

In the next scene, the chick – that we know from the title to be a quail – is dry and fluffed up.  And then is shown running on those big feet up the man’s chest, where it tucks itself under his chin and settles in the fellow’s curly black beard.

I recall standing on a beach many years ago.  It must have been late autumn or early winter because an ice-edged wind was blowing from the sea and I was dressed more for snow than sun.  Suddenly, a tiny bird flew in from the sea and landed on my shoulder, a songbird that somehow had found itself in flight over more ocean than it had bargained for and was hauling buggy back to shore.  It stood there catching its breath for no more than ten seconds before flitting off toward the dune grass. 

I recall the passage in Matthew where Jesus talks about how our heavenly Father feeds the birds without their having to plant or reap or stow their food in barns, which I take also to include little birds that almost get made into omelets and those that wander too far out over the ocean. 

“Are not you more valuable than they?” he asks his disciples, who had been busy scratching at their own concerns.  “Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air …”

It’s such a lovely and comforting image, worth recalling when worry comes and steals the sense out of you.   Prayer on the wing. 

(written 3-22-16)

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