Going Home

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My husband told me about a couple of baby birds that were trying to make their way up our maple tree.  They would get part way up—one farther than the other—and then fall back down to the base of the tree.  It was so sad.

Then the next day when I got home from work, he told me one of them made it almost all the way up to the first branch, but he didn’t see the other one at all.  It’s like a daily drama for us!

The little birds that will one day be yellow finches were determined to make it up that tree.  We would find them clinging to the bark with all their might.  As is God’s plan for nature, they were hard to see on the bark because their feather pattern was camouflaging them.

I was thinking about these birds and their great effort.  Their work was painfully slow and in their world, I’m sure the span they had to traverse up that tree, vast.

We watched those little birds clinging to the tree whenever they had to rest, their little beating hearts and breathless bodies seemingly out of fuel. When they fell down to the ground, they would rest under the large leaf of one of our hostas, only to go back over to the base of the tree and try again.

When Jesus carried his cross, he fell down three times, but he managed to get up and continue down the path to his crucifixion.  The combination of his divine and human nature was unrecognizable to most against expectations of what a Messiah was supposed to look like.

Like those little birds clinging to the tree, we should be clinging to Jesus.  Determined to make it to our eternal home one day, we should not give up when we fall down because the love of the Father is all the power and motivation we need to successfully reach our final resting place in him.

Janet Cassidy
janetcassidy.blogspot.com

 

 

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