GROWING SEEDS: "His Eye Is On You"

 

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

Early last summer, I noticed a precious nest of baby sparrow eggs in the eaves of our boathouse.  Each day, I would head to the boathouse, climb up on a deck bar stool and peek into the nest.  Five eggs.  Then four eggs and one pink, featherless, baby.  Then three eggs and two hatched babies.  Each day, I would race out at first light to sneak a peak at the nest in the eaves until all five babies had been born....and, of course, snap a dozen pictures while I was at it.

I had the mother and father's routine down.  I knew when they would head out for food....I knew where they anxiously parked themselves until I quit snapping pictures of their babies and left.  I watched their babies grow from squawking infants into starving toddlers.....and finally into teenagers too big for the nest and preparing to fly their tiny bodies away from home.  They were part of my family....and I was part of theirs.  I named them all.

Then one hot summer morning, as I was dragging the barstool to its usual vantage point, it startled these five teenage siblings and they attempted to fly out of the nest for the first time.  One flew to the deck table...another flew to the nearby boat...another flew west and landed in the water and two I never found.  Devastated, I tried to find them all and somehow undo what I had just done.  I grabbed the net and fished the one bird out of the water who was barely breathing and quickly decided I needed to back away and let the parents take over.

I don't know what ever became of our sparrow family...they never came back to the nest and I cried every day for a week....I still cry when I think about that day.  But I am reminded that I'm not the only one who cries when a sparrow is lost.  The One who created me; who keeps the planets in their orbits, is also acutely aware of a tiny sparrow that falls to the ground.  

"What is the price of five sparrows - two copper coins?  

Yet God does not forget a single one of them.

And the very hairs on your head are all numbered.  

So don't be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows." 

Luke 12:6-7

And if He cares that much for these five sparrows He formed and knit together in their mother's egg, can you imagine how much more He cares about you in this broken world?