The Frustrated Little Bird

Almost ten years ago, I was having a quiet devotion while attending a Journey Partners spiritual direction training retreat.  The early morning sun peeked through the large picture windows on the east side of my cottage, and for some ten minutes I watched this little bird try desperately to fly through those windows.  He sat on a deck chair just a foot from the window and, every few seconds, flung himself at the window, only to be met by solid glass.  His beak bounced off the glass, throwing him backwards.  In frustrated surprise, he settled back onto the chair and stared at the glass, not really seeing the glass, but the open space beyond which he hoped to reach.  So close, and yet so far, he seemed to say!  Time after time he attempted to break through, each one with the same force—I suppose thinking that “this time” he will break down the barrier.

He finally took one long look at the window, then turned his back on it.  Ah, he has gotten the message, I thought, that the obstacle is impenetrable.  But no, turning back to the window after a couple of minutes, he was at it again.  Finally, some five minutes later he apparently gave up and flew off.  Is it over?  No!! Incredibly, some fifteen minutes later, he flew back to the chair and began his attack on the window again!  He repeated this entire process two more times before I had to leave.  I believe I could have sat there all morning and witnessed the same scenario over and over.  The next day this bird was back at it again!!  What perseverance!!

As usual, such shenanigans put me in mind of us in all of our futile searching.  How many things in our lives are as fruitless as that little bird’s venture?  Be it relationship, vocation, faith, hobby, you name it, are we trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and simply refusing to recognize God’s will in our lives?  I am sure you know the popular definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  I posit that men and women, all of us, are insane when it comes to understanding who we are before our Creator and what that means for how we conduct our lives.

Unlike the bird, we don’t have to continue beating our heads against a brick wall.  We have an excellent brain that can tell us when we are fruitless.  But the mind will not take us all the way to God.  For that we need to move into a totally different space, into the silence where God lives within us.  To our soul.  We need to listen to the truth that the soul can teach us.  But that will not get us all the way either.  We then need to act upon the truth we hear and come to embrace.  This might take a while.  Only then will we turn away from trying unsuccessfully to grab the enticing fruit we see before us. Only then will we move away from the obstacle and go where God wants us to go, perhaps far away from that particular enticement.  When we do that, we come upon what God has for us, exactly where we are supposed to be for maximum joy.  Belatedly, we realize that we would never have chosen this path ourselves, but we know it is where we were bound all the while.

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When We Fail