Column: Information Station
June 2008
Our canary, Sweetie, was nesting. When I uncovered the cage each morning, she eyed me with the determined look of a mother-to-be. When I checked on her during the day, unless she’d taken a brief trip to the seed dish, she was still on the nest—dogged and determined. Each night I covered the cage again, remembering my own pregnancies and commiserated with her. “I know how it is. Making babies is hard. But I’m proud of you. Hang in there.” She simply fixed a frantic, beady eye on me. Of course, I thought. You haven’t done this before.
Life happened to be especially hard for my family during that period of time. That’s why I couldn’t wait each morning to peek in the nursery and witness the Creator’s workmanship. For the miracle of biology and instinct that he engineered on the fifth day in Genesis One was taking place in my living room. I felt like Charles Colson when he viewed the Blue Ridge Mountains “rising out of the mist…The scene took my breath away. I was seeing God’s magnificent creation as if it were newborn.1
After about twelve days, one of her eggs hatched. In the nest was a scrawny, bald baby. Sweetie, the model mother, poked food down its ever-open beak, and kept her baby warm.
This bird story, however, does not have a happy ending.
One morning, I came downstairs to find that the baby had fallen out of the nest. We warmed it and tried to feed it baby formula, but it died. Sweetie looked bewildered. We mourned with her as best we could and buried her baby under an evergreen tree in the yard.
Although Sweetie’s baby was gone, she would persevere, lay more eggs, hatch more babies. That, despite all obstacles, is what she was created to do. She would fulfill her calling.
By the grace of God, so will we.
1 Charles Colson and Harold Fickett, The Faith (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Mi: 2008 p32)
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