There is much I am musing on from our church services last Sunday: good crowds, new members joining and a great spirit of worship. But the few moments before the service began are what really has my memory bank in overdrive.
I saw the box in my daughter's hand as she rushed frantically into my office five minutes before service start time. There were other young people behind her with equally wide eyes and concerned faces.
"It fell out of the nest, dDad. You need to put it back!"
"It" was a small gray baby bird of some kind. I mean no unkindness to our airborne friends, but it was quite an ugly thing. Very few feathers, wide, flat, yellow beak, almost translucent skin.
Pastor Bo Wagner
The nest is in a hard-to-reach, problematic place, high up in the rafters of our drive-under front porch at the main entrance to the church.
But before I could even begin to process how to repatriate the bird, my daughter was already dashing down to the Family Life Center to retrieve a ladder.
As I arrived under the porch, she was meeting me there with the ladder. The crowds were filing in steadily. I placed the ladder in the proper position, took the bird in my hand and started upward. The little guy was pretty calm through it all. He seemed to have no fear of me and did not struggle in my hand.
Reaching the top, I slid him into a tiny opening, behind which I could hear his siblings chirping in the nest. He quickly scampered the last few inches, and when he did, an amazing thing happened: The nest went silent.
The lost family member was home, and all was right with their world.
It was inevitable that my mind would immediately go to the words of Matthew 10:29, "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father."
We so often view the greatness of God through the largest lens possible, the magnificence of his creation: the galaxies, solar systems and marvelous universe he spoke into existence.
But as fitting as it is to see the greatness of God in the things that are incomprehensibly large, it is even more profound to see it in the things that are insignificantly small. An ugly, cheap, helpless bird fell to the ground, and he was there with it as it did.
And in this particular case, he also provided a girl with a tender heart to find it and a father who could not say no to her plea for it.
I am glad this is the God I serve, because just two verses later in Matthew's account, Jesus said, "Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows."
Unless we make it to the rapture, all of us must eventually die. No amount of prayers can keep a person alive forever. But it is those years in the meantime in which we get to marvel at and rejoice in the tender care of God in our lives.
I have seen the results of him healing bodies that doctors said could not be healed. I have seen the results of him comforting hearts that were ready to give up. I have seen him change lives that no therapist or medication was able to help.
In my own life, I have seen him meet specific needs that no one else knew about in ways that could never, ever be explained away as coincidence.
God is there when a bird falls. I am more valuable to him than a bird. I wonder how often it is that, when I fall, the Son of God looks over to his Father and says, "Dad, he fell. You need to put him back."
Bo Wagner is pastor of the Cornerstone Baptist Church of Mooresboro, N.C., a widely traveled evangelist and the author of several books. Email him at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org.