A number of days ago I found a baby dove in my front yard. I watched it for a number of hours, wanting to see if its parents were taking care of it. The bird was not quite a fledging, meaning that it left the nest a bit too soon. It was still covered in its downy infantile feathers. It just sat huddled in the sun.
The same day I found the dove I also had a visit with a patient whose leg had just been amputated. When we talked about it she told me, “I just can’t believe the leg is never going to come back. That is the hardest.” My visit with her was followed by another in which the patient is slowly dying from an infection that can’t seem to be stopped. He and I talked at length about his wish to die; the suffering is just too great.
As I watched the dove I thought of Matthew 6:26,“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” There was no food for the bird in my yard. Just as god did not save the leg or ease the suffering of the patients in the hospital.
I ended up bringing the bird in for the night. I fixed up a box, made a nest and decided that I was providing hospice care for the evening. The dove was small, barely moving and making no sounds. I had no assumptions that the bird would make it through the night. When I woke in the morning I opened the box and it was still breathing. I called a vet and figured out how to feed it.
Life is just plain awful sometimes – and god doesn’t always fix it. Yet, still, life takes care of itself. In this process of life, of god, some legs are saved, while some infections can’t be cured. Just as some birds die before they fly. The truth is, on a flat semantic level, god does not feed all the birds. However, if god is bigger than semantics, food is always being had.
