Reflection: Paul Harvey’s The Man and the Birds
Paul Harvey used to tell this story every Christmas Eve. It's a tradition worth continuing:
As you were growing up, it is likely that you at least once imagined what you wanted to be when you grew up. For me, one of the many things was being fascinated with radio. I remember going camping and asking if I could sleep in the car, amazed that our remote camping spot in central Oregon could, in the middle of the night, catch something, anything, from Wyoming or San Francisco.
So my friends, may I direct you to a story that was a favorite of my radio hero, Paul Harvey who used to use it every Christmas Eve. He and his friend Louis Cassels once tried to track down who wrote it, but he said they never did find who wrote it. Like him, I guess, some words are meant to stand on their own.
The Christmas Story the way it’s usually told — that God was born a man in a manger — escapes some people I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions. And this one is so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced, I’d like to submit this modern parable: The Man and the Birds.
The man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge. He was a kind decent, mostly good man, generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other people. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn’t make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man.
He told his wife, “I’m truly sorry to distress you, but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for the family. And so he stayed, and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read some news. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound…then another, and then yet another. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled, miserable in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter — all he would have to do is direct the birds to that shelter.
Quickly he put on a coat and boots and gloves, and he tramped through the deepening snow to the barn and he opened the doors wide. And he turned on a light so the birds would know the way in. But the birds did not come in.
So he figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs. The birds just continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them but he could not. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn. And that’s when he realized that they were afraid of him.
“To them,” he reasoned, “I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me…that I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how?”
Any move he made tended to frighten them and confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.
And he thought to himself, “If only I could be a bird, and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm barn. But I would have to be one of them, wouldn’t I? So they could see, and hear and understand.”
At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis, O Come All Ye Faithful – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas.
And he sank to his knees in the snow.
From my house to yours the Christmas, I love you.
♱♱♱
“Reflections” happen on Sundays and special occasions. They’re shorter than what we do Monday through Saturday when we spend about 20 minutes a day and get through the New Testament in about 10 months and the Old Testament in about 14 months.
Oh, and we do this together — with a passion for just keepin’ it real, having conversations like normal people, and living out the love of Jesus better every single day.
Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in digitally-extended communication and connection, an award-winning speaker, award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. And…
…all that blah blah blah means nothing if he doesn’t help you fall more in love with Jesus and the people in Jesus’ world.
