Baby Bird

This past week I spent in Nashville at continuing education for all officers in their first five years.

On an afternoon break as I was coming up the steps I noticed a tiny, sick baby bird on the cement. I started to pass it by but then stopped and stooped down. I looked at it for awhile and then decided to pick it up.

I'm a city girl and I have no idea what to do with birds that are half dead so I wen to where all the other officers were congregated and found a boy officer that I knew to help me. He quickly shuffled me to another larger group of male officers.

One of those guys took the bird and as I found out a few minutes later had fun killing it.

I was mad until a wise friend told me that the mother of the bird either wanted it to die by kicking it out of its nest due to disease, or would have allowed it to die since it now had my (and several other) smells on it.

I didn't know that the bird would die. I was just trying to help.

Sometimes we try to help others along spiritually with good intentions but really we are killing them, too. I made a friend who I genuinely wanted to "help" spiritually but after a year I've learned that I wasn't the right person to help. Not sure if I misheard from the LORD or if my "I" got in the way of what the LORD was trying to do, but it's a good lesson for me all the while. Doesn't mean I or we shouldn't make an attempt, but we need to know what we are doing before we jump in with the best intentions in the world only to see them fail. It is absolutely imperative that we are aligned spiritually with what we are doing. We work with the souls of people. That's serious stuff.

Also, I found it telling that dozens of other officers walked right by the same baby bird and left him. And then when I took him for help I was shuffled from one group to another. Not sure if no one was willing to help or just couldn't. In the end the one guy did kill the bird, which at first I thought was cruel, but was it? At least he was willing to do something with the bird when so many others were not.

It was just a baby bird, but still. I'm an over thinker.

"His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me...."