Sunday Morning Meds--Trust

“O LORD Almighty, blessed are those who trust in you.” Psalm 84

We first spotted the nest when a robin flew up into it, so close to our window that it was almost startling.  Up high off the ground, that nest was in no danger from neighborhood cats, it seemed, securely constructed in the crotch of a substantial branch of an ornamental crab just off our deck.  When I pointed it out to my wife, she had the same thought I did—how great it would be to show our grandchildren. 

Soon enough there were babies.  Before Memorial Day already you couldn’t miss them, rustling around whenever mom would alight, thrusting up those thin yellow beaks as if their only job was to eat—which it was.  Soon enough, you could hear them, their chirp slightly higher, more unrestrained than their mother’s, often frantic.

On Memorial Day one fell.  A gray-brown smudge of feathers simply dropped out of the nest, bounced off a smaller branch on an untoward descent, then plopped to the ground.  There she was—or he—the kid anyway or one of them, speckled and unkempt.  Crying like a baby, which, of course, he was—or she.  That song wasn’t lament, but sheer terror.  She’d lost her place.

It must be horrifying, traumatizing, for the rest of the bunch. With as many robins as there are in the neighborhood, some red-breasted shrink has to have set out a shingle, I thought. 

I wasn’t about to put her back.  We were sitting on the deck, reading, and occasionally watching her helicopter mom, who wouldn’t let her alone.

Then, suddenly, a melee of chirping.  Had to be a cat around.  I got out of my chair, stepped off the porch and into the evergreens, and sure enough, a mangy tailless tabby took off towards the garage.  That baby robin was safe. 

Tuesday, on my bike, right in front of the neighbor’s house, on my way to school, I had to swerve to avoid hitting a baby robin on the pavement, flat as a paper doll.  Car got him—or her.  No cat. 

Honestly, I shrugged my shoulders.  I’d watched that mother nurture her child for weeks.  That child had been her life, and now the cause of her life was no more.

But even as I type these words, a baby robin’s high-pitched song is starting the morning just outside my window because even though some mother’s baby didn’t make it, someone else’s has.  Maybe it’s the one we watched grow.

I’m just happy most of that story escaped my grandchildren because they’re far too young for sadness.  That flattened baby robin would have done my granddaughter in, I’m sure.  She remembered last Memorial Day only because, on a bike trip, we saw a dead squirrel—“with blood on it”—on the road, she said. I’d forgotten until she mentioned it again.  

Such is life.  Our maples dumped several hundred thousand whirlybird seeds this spring.  If I and my mower have anything to say about it, not one of them will make it.

Such is life.  There are great stories, in and out the nest—how a tabby high-tailed it out of the neighborhood, how a hungry stomach got a meal, how a robin’s song delights the dawn.

But some dreams get flattened, and eventually, of course, all the babies die.

The verifiable soul of this beauty-of-a-psalm, Psalm 84, is this last verse.  Through all the perils, all the dangers, all the grief, in those moments when we’re so blasted far from the nest that we nearly despair at ever finding our way back or escaping danger sufficient to end it all, those who can continue to trust, those who won’t forget God or let him forget them, those trusting, fallen children, in faith, somehow keep singing.