The birds are back

Spring came early and the birds have been making a racket outside my door.

It's wonderful. It's like when a baseball stadium that has sat idle as a widow all winter comes alive again with the throng of humanity and the aroma of hot dogs and beer.

We are the only creatures on earth who worry. Ever thought of that? Of course I can't prove it is so. And we may expect any day now a pronouncement from the people who gave us Piltdown Man that we have incontrovertible proof that turtles fret.

My source, against all this, is Jesus himself, who compares our race unfavorably to that of the lilies and avian chatterboxes:

"Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these" (Matthew 6:25-29).

Let us hear what the birds have to teach us:

You don't want to be shown up by birds, do you?