OF BIRDS AND HUMANS
About one thousand years before Jesus came, some poor soul was in
awful trouble and poured out his heart to God (Psalm 55). "You must
listen to me, please," he said, "because I’ve no one else to turn to and
my enemies have me at their mercy—I’m all tangled up in their snare."
He sees himself as a frightened and imprisoned bird beating its wings
against its prison-bars, instinctively wanting someone to open the door.
And if that were to happen it would rise into the air and head for the
wide-open spaces. Of himself he says, "Fear and trembling come upon me,
and horror overwhelms me. And I say, ‘Oh that I had wings like a dove! I
would fly away and be at rest’."
It isn’t hard to imagine what floods through the high strung bird,
frantic with fear and knowing without understanding that this isn’t
life—it isn’t hard to imagine the surge that goes through it when it
finds its way to the sky and freedom no longer barred. All the power in
its tiny body exerted skyward; the little heart beating like a boiler
house at some logging factory—free! Freedom! Enemies below, the skyward
spiral, the joy, the delicious joy of relief, and the realisation of
what it was made for—freedom, in the bright blue sky! All that’s worth
having remains; nothing lost that makes life worth living. The psalmist
imagines all this and turns to the God that can give it to him.
Nineteen hundred years after the birth of the Christ, in America,
where the great Depression had really taken hold, when tens of millions
were jobless, hungry, homeless and despairing, Albert Brumley read Psalm
55 and wrote the hymn, "I’ll Fly Away". He knew that for those who
trusted in God, the crushing circumstances of life weren’t the whole
story and that one day prison bars would be shattered and the believer
would fly home; home to freedom and to the wide-open spaces.
Yes, yes, but what does that hope have to do with the present almost
intolerable burdens? Well, for one thing, it says that the burden
doesn’t have the last word and that can’t be bad news. I can only
imagine how it must be for those who do not believe, especially if their
lives are a prolonged purgatory. To live in chronic misery from birth
to death, with no one to help and then to die in squalid poverty—end of
story? Now that would be inexpressible horror. Never freedom!
Never hope of freedom! Only kidding ourselves when we say that maybe
something will change; knowing full well there’s not the ghost of a
chance?
There are those who think that genuine believers are escapists, that
they’re people who don’t want to face life with steady eyes. This is
untrue. Real believers are precisely those that take troubled existence
and life most seriously. And it’s because they take the whole of it
seriously—the lives of others as well as their own— that they turn to God and say,
"You will not leave us alone in this and you are surely offering better to all our fellow humans."
Then comes Jesus and says, "I am come that you might have life to the full and I am the resurrection and the life."
Here, tell me this: has God made a commitment to every human born on this planet?
Every human in every age? If he has, then tell me this: how does that
commitment show itself to multiplied millions whose lives from birth to
death are stories of prolonged crucifixions? Who look heavenward in
despair and have never heard a word of the gospel of God in Jesus
Christ?
Think noble things of God!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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