A Little Bird Told Me

Here is something I wrote about almost exactly 5 years ago to this day. It reminds me of the thoughts many of us seem to be fighting these days, and for what seems to be good reason. I found out otherwise. Thought I'd share it. Maybe you will relate.

I'd been keeping regular company with a whole host of real and potential predicaments. There was plenty to dread going on in my world, and I managed to dread every last sliver of it with amazing flare, and quite on schedule. My thoughts hadn't been the best of company, but "bad company" isn't that easy to dodge once you take up with it. It was 12:30 a.m. when out of sheer exhaustion from worry and fear about the "what-ifs and when's" of the days to come that I gave up my attempt to read and called it a night. 

It felt like the deepest part of my sleep when I first awoke to the fray outside the window. It was a friendly chatter, but completely out of the ordinary, and the little feathered ones carried on as if it were perfectly normal for birds to sing and play at such an hour. I was puzzled... maybe they'd been thrown off schedule, or was I that out of it? Darkness CAN play tricks. 

But no, it was still nighttime, or rather early morning, almost 3:00.  What could have them celebrating at such an odd time? Was it some joyful event in their little fluttery world? Didn't they know that darkness is an occasion when worry owns the wind and finds its well-worn way to the hearts of mothers everywhere?  It's all I seemed to know anyway. 

Even by the next morning as a new day began to sneak past the blinds into the living room, shining little horizontal strips of gold onto the wall, they were still out there, holding their own singing just outside my window.

Somewhere during the party that lasted the night, a sweet little solo artist had stolen the show, and the chatter became a solitary song of one gifted bird serenading me in my half-dream state.  Usually to awaken at such a point would mean certain, daunting thoughts would crawl up and whisper in my ear,  proceeding to hover like something from an ominous movie. After all, nighttime is Worry's very finest hour. Once it makes its cunning move and has me, I am consumed. My mind is easily hijacked during the powerful nighttime quiet that transforms truth into an eerie fiction set before the backdrop of darkness. 

But not this time. This time, my little sentinel kept me company instead. Sweet simple melodies came in through the cracks where the windows won't quite close.  She sang as if perched close enough to calm waking thoughts she knew would be perched at the brink of one of the gut wrenching turmoils I wrestle so well. 

She sang so as to send me a message that sounded something like this:

"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them... Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

... Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."  (Matthew 6:26, 27 & 34)

And the magic of her music brought a calm to a heart well-practiced in the art of fear. So I lie in the dark and listened as if lying back on the lawn at an outdoor concert, lost in the sheer joy of the spectacular moment. I trusted those notes that spoke of my Heavenly Father's love, a love that stopped by in the dark to remind me I am not alone. 

And with that song in the night, I was lulled into a rare and peaceful sleep.

The worries of my day, my fears for the next, and a whole host of possible scenarios that I normally tend to rehearse as if I might (heaven forbid) forget them, were not mine to hold onto after all. 

I know... because a little bird told me.

Liz