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"A Christmas Lesson from the Birds"
Contributed by: Mark McDowell on 12/13/2007

Here's my favorite Christmas story. I first heard it while listening to Paul Harvey's radio broadcast.

"You know, the Christmas story, the God born a man in a manger and all that escapes some folks mostly, 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 submit a modern parable.
"Now 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 men but he just didn't 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.
"'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'd feel like a hypocrite, that he'd much rather just stay at home but that he would wait up for them and so he stayed adn they went to the Christmas eve services.
"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 his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound...then another...and then another...sort of a thump or a thud. 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 miserably in the snow. They'd been caught in the storm and in a desperate search for shelter had tried to tly through his large front window.
"Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze. So he remembered the barn where the children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, overshoes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light.....but the birds did not come in.
"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 and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow.
"He tried catching them...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 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 -- that I'm not trying to hurt them but to help them -- but how? Because any move he made tended to frighten and confuse them. They just would not follow -- they would not be led or shooed 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 be one of them 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 Fideles'...
And listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas, he sank to his knees in the snow."

Mark McDowell
2390 Homestead Place
Longmont CO 80504
(303) 589-7084


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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Mark McDowell

Longmont , CO

Mark McDowell has posted 1 story and 0 comments since joining on 12/13/2007. Mark McDowell 's average story rating is 0.
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