Scruffy

Do you know that Bible verse that tells us not to worry? Where Jesus says to look at the birds of the air, who do not plant food for themselves or reap their harvest or store away their food? Jesus says that God still feeds them. Then he tells us that we who are constantly working or worried about working and planning our futures and how we are going to provide for ourselves (do we really do that? provide for ourselves I mean?) are of MUCH greater value than those birds to our Father.

I have become a bird watcher. No joke...and it is not necessarily my job to feed these birds that come to the farm every day, but I am sitting here looking at these bird feeders and my bird friends who are visiting them right now, and noticing that the birds need more food. So I will be right back.

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Ok. So don't worry, they've all been fed. I put my cowboy boots on over my pajama pants, donned my robe, and went outside. If I had done that in the city, I think that neighbors like Agnes from the TV sitcom Bewitched would have thought that I was crazy.
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Anyway, I have become a bird watcher. In Early Childhood Education we talk about "just in time" learning. This is the type of learning that is not forced or staged, but occurs just when the child is most interested and NEEDS that information. Like rather than forcing a child to memorize measurements from a math textbook, a child might think to himself one afternoon, "Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, I think I am going to make her some cookies. Let me get a cookbook...now which one has cookie recipes in it? This one does not have cookies listed in the index, but this one does. Hmmm...it says to turn to page 85. Ok, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85! Ok, this recipe says I need a half cup of melted butter. The butter is measured on the stick in tablespoons... I wonder how many tablespoons are in a half of a cup?" And then the child has to figure it out, so he is LEARNING, but he is learning the information at a time in which he is most interested because he really wants to make his mom these cookies for her birthday. The child is much more likely to remember that 8 tablespoons equal half of a cup at this point than if his teacher had required him to memorize that information from a book for a test in class.

That is how I have become with birds. I have never in my life been interested in birds, and had you tried to tell me about them through a text book or some film I might have fallen asleep. But I have so enjoyed watching the birds at the farm that now I flip through books to find out what each one is, and I have named a couple of them, and I have become a bird watcher.

Scruffy is a chickadee. He visits the feeders quite often with his friends, and he is one of the braver ones. When I go out to the feeders and refill them, it takes some of the birds a little bit of time to realize I have gone back inside and will not be bugging them at the feeders anymore. But Scruffy, he just comes back almost immediately. What Scruffy and some of his friends have taught me is just how amazing those verses in Matthew 6 that I talked about at the beginning of this post actually are. Birds eat ALL DAY. And they do not sow or reap a harvest, they do not store away their food like bears and such. They just eat when they are hungry. And if you think about it, they are fluttering and flittering and gliding and hopping and escaping from foxes and cats and rainstorms and windstorms all day long, so they work up a huge appetite! God still provides for them. And I don't think they worry about it. I don't think that they stop and say,"Oh man, what is wrong with me? I expend way to much energy so I have to eat all the time...what if one day there isn't enough food left???"

No, they just eat and play and do what they, as birds, were created to do.....fly.