A New Creation

And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old order has passed away; now everything is new! ~ 2 Corinthians 5:17

During migration, city lights create a very dangerous situation for birds. Especially when the ceiling is low, lights will draw in migrants. Since birds don’t understand the concept of glass, they interpret the reflection of the surrounding vegetation as more vegetation. Because of this, some of them fly into the glass Depending on the speed and angle, the strike will cause injury or death. In a city like Cleveland over the course of a couple of months of migration the number of birds will be in the triple digits. On a good day, the live birds will outnumber the dead ones, but sadly that is rare.

I volunteered with Lights Out Cleveland for a few seasons, retrieving birds that were injured or died from window strikes. Capturing a live bird is often a challenge. The injured bird doesn’t know that the large biped with a net is attempting to help it. When encountering a particularly feisty bird, we would sometimes talk to it. “It’s OK, you’re going to the spa. Tim will take good care of you. He’ll feed you and give you some medicine. And he’ll give you a pretty bracelet (every bird was banded so if it happened to be caught again more data could be gathered).” I can’t say that it helped much to calm the bird, but it certainly was part of making us humans feel better about what the bird was experiencing.

From the bird’s perspective, it was experiencing trauma on top of trauma. But from the “God’s-eye view” there was good news: the old order had passed away, everything was new. At the heart of the Christian story is the exceptional wisdom of the Incarnation. God understood that we are frightened, injured birds afraid of the net coming to capture us, even though it is for our own good. So God became a bird like us and got captured!

Prayer: Great Creator, thank you for the new creation. Help us to see it. Amen