ADHD Sparrows

Yesterday morning, I was surprised to see that the sun was shining (Rain had been in the forecast for the next 3 days) and it was warmer than it has been for a few weeks. I decided spontaneously to take a little road trip to see my son because the next few days were supposed to be a lot cooler with rain. It turned out to be a smart decision because it was 70 degrees, mostly sunny, and he and I were able to sit outside on his patio and play cards, reminisce about the past (which he loves doing) and I was even able to act silly enough to make him laugh wholeheartedly—something I thought I would never hear again just a few months ago when he was hospitalized and then later when he was under hospice care. It was a great visit and even when I got home a few hours later, the weather was still great, so I decided to fire up a hookah and sit in the sun on the deck and just bask in the sunlight.

As I’m sitting there looking into my side yard, I see that the bird feeders are all empty, so I filled them all with seed and a suet cake, refreshed the water in the birdbath, and then sat down, feet up, to soak in the beauty of the day. Within a few minutes, the feeders were teeming with birds, mostly sparrows and a few others, chirping and peeping and bouncing all over the feeders and the mesh nets beneath them, and also on the ground. I counted how many fence posts were across the yard, and there are 48 of them. There was literally one bird on every single plank, and even Butch was mesmerized by the vast number of creatures flitting about.

In Matthew 10: 29 Jesus says, “Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without God’s care.”

I thought of that verse in that moment, and I decided, just for the hell of it, to watch just one sparrow for as long as I could. This turned out to be impossible! I would pick a particular bird, but I couldn’t keep up with it because of how fast it swooped and bounced and pecked and then flew back up onto the fence post. All the sparrows looked the same to me, to be honest, so I tried to fixate on one whose behavior seemed more distinctive than the others….again, to no avail. I literally could not distinguish one feathered friend from another. Yet, God keeps track of them all, and not one falls to the ground without God’s parental care.

So then, if that is true, if Jesus is correct, then God knows exactly which bird is which and he has each of their feathers numbered in the same way we’re told that God has each of the hairs on our heads counted. (Luke 12:7) So…if God is watching over the erratic swooping, endless chattering, and seemingly unpredictable movements of a sparrow, then the awareness and attention that God pays to each one of us has to be something way beyond our understanding. And maybe it’s not just the big things that God is tending to, maybe it’s even the details of our life that God is holding in the Divine Consiousness.

That said, there is no magic God or Jesus who’s going to find us a parking space at the mall, help us win the lottery, or get us a great job offer while we’re napping on the sofa. The power of Christ is within, not without, and if Jesus is correct in telling us that we will do even greater miracles than he was able to do, then maybe the first step in claiming our Christ-like powers is to acknowledge that God cares for us, that God’s love is absolute and unconditional, and that even when life ruffles our feathers and we’re flitting about like a sparrow off his ADHD meds, God knows what we need and is already preparing the very thing for us in advance of our asking.