The Man and the Birds

(This story is based in part on the version as told by Paul Harvey.  I have cherished this story for many years and hope it is an enriching experience for you as well.)

We do not know the creator of this wonderful story, but our gratitude abounds for his or her contribution to our understanding of the essence of Christmas.

THE Christmas story, the “God born a man in a manger” version simply escapes some people.  Perhaps they seek complex answers to their questions, and this one is really very simple.  So for the cynics and the skeptics, and the unconvinced, I submit this modern parable.

I want you to meet our main player in this story.  He was not a Scrooge – he was a kind and descent man.  Some would say he was a good man.  He was generous with his family, fair in all of his dealings with other men, yet he just did not believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmastime.  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. 

Christmas Eve came and his wife and family were preparing to go to the nearby Christmas Eve church service. 

I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.”  He said he would feel like a hypocrite.  He would much rather stay home, but he would wait up for them.   So he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away, snow began to fall.  He went to the large landscape window and watched the flurries get heavier and heavier, and then went back to his fireside chair to read his newspaper. 

Minutes later, he was startled by a thudding sound, and then another.  At first he thought perhaps some kids were throwing snowballs against his living room window, but when he went to investigate, he found a flock of birds

huddled miserably in the snow.  They had 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 in the snow and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony6.  That would provide a warm shelter, if only he could direct the birds to it.

Quickly he put on his coat and goulashes and tramped through the deepening snow to the barn.  He opened the doors wide and turned on the light, but the birds did not come in.  He figured food would entice them so he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs and sprinkled them in the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted, open doorway of the stable, but to his dismay the birds ignored the bread crumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow.

He tried catching them; he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them and waving his arms.  Instead they scattered in every direction, except into the warm lighted barn, and then 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.  I’m not trying to hurt them.  I’m trying to help them.  But how?”

Any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them.  They just would not follow.  They would not be lead, or directed because they feared him.  ]

“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “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 … to the safe, warm barn.  But I would have to become one of them so they could see and hear and understand.

At that moment the church bells began to ring.  Their sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind and he stood there listening to the bells ringing out – “O Come Let Us Adore Him” – and as the bells rang out the glad tidings of Christmas, he sank to his knees in the snow. 

Here is the perfect song to capture the heart of this story, 

His Love Reaching

P Michael Biggs

Offering Hope

Encouragement Inspiration

One Word at a Time