What the Birds Don't Do

Somewhere around midnight, the future clocks in for its shift. Will the savings be enough? Is this career the right one? What happens to me at sixty, at eighty? We answer the anxiety the only way we know how: more work. Stay later, push harder, and maybe the future can be made safe. But overtime is a premium paid on an insurance policy no company sells. The future refuses to be guaranteed, at any price.

Into that spiral, Jesus offers a strange piece of counsel: 'See the birds of the sky.' Be careful about what he is not saying. He is not saying birds are idle: a sparrow works from first light, and anyone who has watched one knows it. What the birds don't do is the other job. 'They don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns': they build none of the infrastructure of a guaranteed future. And still, 'your heavenly Father feeds them.'

Notice, too, what the verse does not ask of you. It doesn't ask you to quit your job, stop saving, or pretend the future is safe. Jesus elsewhere commends the builder who counts the cost before starting a tower. The question this verse raises is quieter and goes deeper: who do you believe is feeding you? Is your work the desperate project of someone who must save herself, or the daily receiving of someone whose Father was planning breakfast anyway? Same desk. Same train. Entirely different weight on the shoulders.

Then comes the hinge: 'Aren't you of much more value than they?' A sparrow produces nothing measurable, no output, no promotion, no yearly review, and the Father feeds it anyway. Which means the feeding was never payment for performance. If God provides for a bird that contributes nothing to any economy, how much more for you, whose value, Jesus insists, was settled long before your productivity ever entered the conversation.

This week, try actually obeying the verse, it is, after all, a command with a direct object. On the station platform, or from the office window, watch one bird for one minute. It isn't anxious. Not because its life is safe, a sparrow's life is anything but, rather because it lives today's daylight on today's food. Keep your first job. The invitation is to resign from the second one: the night shift of worry. Look at the birds. Then remember whose you are.

Questions about what you just read?