“Behold the birds…How they hustle!”
I was impressed the other day while watching birds scurrying around in their search for food just outside the window of the place where I was soon going to be singing. There’s so much to learn from these beautiful creatures. I watched them landing & taking off as they were scavenging for bugs, food scraps, seeds, whatever they could find to eat. At that moment Jesus’ words came to mind:
“Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” [Matthew 6:26]
I’ve done this bird-watching thing a thousand times before, and I’ve usually gotten the picture lesson of them NOT worrying about tomorrow, as their Heavenly Father meets their needs daily. But this time I was impressed with the fact of HOW HARD THEY WORK at finding that daily bread, and all the EFFORT that went in to fulfilling this promise of their daily supply. The food was not delivered to them on a silver platter or a bird feeder, but here in the beautiful world God had created they were having to hustle on a daily basis to FIND the food that was supplied for them — flying here, flying there, landing, scraping about, even digging in the earth sometimes — and then eating what they found on the spot or carrying off their hard-earned treasure to their young who were hungrily waiting elsewhere in a hopefully safe home these same birds had previously constructed for their young. There was real EFFORT going on here, there was searching/seeking/finding involved — He had promised it, and it was out there somewhere for them, but they had to go and look for it.
That same Father has promised to supply for us as well as Jesus pointed out, but we still have to put in a lot of effort sometimes to get our needs, to first to find it for ourselves, and/or then bring it home to our loved ones. So accompanying that beautiful promise of God’s supply is the reality of our having to sweat for it, look for it, find it, and then transport it home for our loved ones.
When detailing how to get what we need from our Father Jesus told us “Ask, seek, knock (and keep asking, seeking, and knocking) and THEN, as a result, you will be given, you’ll find, doors will be opened to you.”… He knew that the Father LOVES to show us His love by giving us what we need, but in most situations the reality is that we will still have to work at it. We should not expect it to come without effort, much less harbor feelings of entitlement while sitting on our couch waiting for the Delivery Man to arrive with our ‘order.’ Grant you, it’s lovely when it happens that way, as I’m sure birds are happy when they find food close at hand, like on the ground below the nest, or in a nearby bird feeder some human has set up … But for the most part, like those lovely little creatures, we will have to do the hustling and the hard work of looking for our needs. And that’s the only way that promise will actually be fulfilled.
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