When I was around 13/14, we moved to a suburb of Pittsburgh called Wilkinsburg. It was the second move in less than 3 years and I wasn’t adapting well. I was painfully shy (really) and had horrible self-esteem. But, I did have my very own room. It was on the top floor of the house and had yellow-striped wallpaper on the walls and wallpaper with yellow roses (and/or other flowers) on the slanting ceiling. The window created a kind of alcove, and was a perfect fit for one end of my twin bed.
One of the things I really enjoyed while sitting in my little alcove or even lazing in bed before getting up was listening to the birds sing outside. What beautiful music. I don’t think I ever saw the birds (maybe I didn’t look that hard those days), but I always heard them. It made me think about the wonders of creation. Birds are such delicate, elegant creatures. (I’ll admit that the predatory birds don’t tend to appear delicate, but they still have a marvelous grace about them. I don’t think there were a lot of them in my urban suburb.) It’s amazing that songs of such variety could come out of beaks (I mean, really, does anyone think that designing a musical instrument from scratch would result in a beak?). In college a course on perception made me marvel even more over the fact that not only were the birds designed to sing but my ears were designed to hear music – not all animals are so lucky!
For some reason that I can’t quite explain, hearing the birds sing seemed to be one of the ways God would be telling me He loved me. What a blessing – such a blessing that even now when I see and hear birds I am just in awe and thankful.
