A Lesson from a Bird

The veteran radio broadcaster PAUL HARVEY told a story that that was repeated often for many years on Christmas Eve.

The Man and the Birds by Paul Harvey

bird feeding from a gloved hand

You know, The Christmas story, “God born as a man, lying in a manger”, and all that, escapes some moderns. Mostly I think because they seek complex answers to their questions, and this one is so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the sceptics and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable:

A good man

Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a Scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men, but he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn’t make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man.

“I’m truly sorry to distress you”, he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas eve”, he said he’d feel like a hypocrite, that he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. So he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Strange noises

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper.
Minutes later, he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another. And then another – sort of a thump or a thud.

At first, he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They had been caught in the storm and in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Freezing outside

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly, he put on a coat and goulashes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn.

He opened the doors wide and turned on a light. But the birds did not come in.

He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow making a trail the yellow lighted, wide open door to the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow.

He tried catching them.

He tried “shooing” them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction except into the warm lighted barn.

They were afraid

Then he realized that they were afraid of him. “To them”, he reasoned, “I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could let them know that they can trust me. That I’m not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how?”

Any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led, or “shooed” because they feared him.

If only…

“If only I could be a bird”, he thought to himself “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm barn, but I would have to be one of them so they could see and hear, and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind.
He stood there listening to the bells, Adeste Fidelis.

Listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.

Would you like to hear the voice of Paul Harvey as he tells this story?
You will find here a beautiful YouTube presentation of his broadcast

Image credit: Bird on hand by Dreamstime.com

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