On frigid winter mornings, the fluttering of wings outside my office window sometimes distracts me. But I welcome my feathered visitors - today an evening grosbeak, chickadees, magpies, woodpeckers, and pine siskins.
Birds speak hope to me. They always have. At times when I've most needed it, God has sent wings. Birds remind me that despite daunting circumstances, God cares for me. That he is faithful. That he will provide what he knows I most need. And that when I cease crowing and flapping and roost in him, his love covers me like great wings.
Sometimes birds swoop in through the gates of memory, on the wind of a story.
I met Clarence in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in a sterile hospital room where stress ran thick and hope ran thin. The Preacher lay in Bed 2. Clarence, a silent, snowy-haired gentleman, easily in his eighties, occupied Bed 3.
The Preacher rarely spoke. I often rattled on anyway, hoping he'd not mind. One day as I did so, Clarence sat up.
"Wouldn't be any purple martins in this city," he said, "if it weren't for my father."
He'd startled me. "Really? Why's that?"
Clarence was raised in the city, but he was only a boy in the nineteen-thirties. One day his bird-watcher father said, "The only way to discover if purple martins inhabit a region is to invite them."
"So he issued an invitation," Clarence told me.
Neighbours and friends ribbed him, but that spring Clarence's father raised the first purple martin house in town - a large log-pole with a bird condominium stuck high on its tip end.
A single pair of martins nested there that first season. "How many the next year?" I asked.
"Full house," he said, resting back on his pillow, smiling a little. The pleasure of that memory had clearly lasted for seventy-odd years. "The neighbours stopped laughing and started building their own martin apartments."
I thought of that generous bird lover building that monstrous birdhouse, uncaring that his neighbours believed him a fool. Unknowing that some seventy calendars later, in the room of a hospital yet un-built, his son would tell that story with pride to the wife of the man in the next bed. A mostly paralyzed man with West Nile neurological disease and an uncertain prognosis.
My confidence that my husband would recover had been challenged. But once again - as he would do often in the days ahead, God sent wings.
This time they effortlessly throbbed their way through decades to perch in my soul. They reminded me that sometimes outcomes fly contrary to assumptions and probabilities. That I needed to issue hope an invitation, build it a place to settle, and leave the results to God.
Seven decades after the first pair of martins swooped into town, the striking birds are common summer visitors in Yorkton. And three years after meeting Clarence, the Preacher walks upright and shares his story wherever God opens a door.
Need hope? It flutters near. Invite it.
