For Wilshire Baptist Church
I don’t know what birds think, but I’d like to believe that the finches hatched in the hanging fern basket on our front porch are thinking, “What is this? Is this the way it’s going to be? I was born into this mess? Somebody . . . HELP!”
It’s been rainy, chilly and windy ever since they were hatched. Their basket has been spinning wildly, and yet they seem to ride it out with aplomb — their little heads bobbing and their little eyes blinking. They seem immune to fear, and why shouldn’t they be. In a few days these same birds will be sitting in trees and on phone lines where they will have to hold on tight and move with the movement.
Science tells us it’s all instinct. They know what to do in a storm just as they know how to sit up and fluff their feathers while waiting for their parents to bring food, and they know how to open their mouths when their parents bring that food. It’s all just instinct.
There are days when I wish that I could face life with pre-installed instinct that directs my every action and reaction. I wish that I could bob and blink through the storms of life knowing that all is OK. But I can’t and I don’t. I seem to be wired for doubt. Not loud, outward questioning of anything and everything, and not overwhelming angst, but inner puzzling about the imperfections and injustices of life that distract and impede me.
But while instinct is fine at a basic survival level, doubt has its value too. Doubt generates questions that incite possibilities that require decisions that lead to actions. Doubt is a mother of invention and art, because anyone who creates at some point asks, “Can I” and “Should I” before ultimately saying, “Yes I can” and then doing.
Without doubt we would have no need for faith. And faith may be the ultimate creative act because it forces us to constantly measure, weigh, ponder, discern and calibrate who we are and what we should be doing and most certainly ask, “Who is this God who put us in this stormy world along with the birds bobbing and blinking in the basket outside.”
As I get a little older, however, I am beginning to see how mature faith can begin to look and feel more like instinct. The more storms you’ve been through, the more you can look back and say, “Oh yeah, that was tough. I thought I’d never make it and yet here I am.”
The closest I’ve come to seeing this type of bobbing, blinking, instinctive faith is when I flew with my grandparents to my brother’s wedding. They were in their early 80s and had never flown in a jet, and I watched their faces as the engines roared and we rolled faster and faster until we finally took flight. Their heads bobbed around as they took it all in, and their eyes twinkled with a sort of glee. There was no fear, just wonder at the experience. And behind that wonder was faith that all was OK.