Article December 29, 1923 Issue

A Lesson from the Birds

ROSALIE HOOVER

It was a very cold day in winter, and a terrific gale was blowing, when one who had enlisted in the great crusade which Christian Scientists have undertaken against sickness and sin received a call to go to another part of the city to help a dear one who seemed at that time to be tried in the furnace of affliction. For some days error had appeared to be persistent and obstinate. It had been halted, but there it stood; and as this worker in Truth was standing at a transfer corner waiting for a belated street car, a great sense of discouragement came upon her. She knew she had been faithful in the work of applying the truth, and yet the error had not yielded. Along with the traitor, discouragement, there crept in another subtle robber, resentment that error had brought her to this cold, bleak, open space, where there was no protection from the bitter cold and fury of the wind and storm.

All at once, amidst the hardest gale, she heard a twittering, twittering, overhead; and, on looking up, found she was standing under a bare tree whose branches were filled with little brown birds. The harder the winds blew and the branches swayed, the tighter these little creatures held on, swaying with them, twittering all the louder. Into the burdened thought of the observer came the "still small voice" of Truth, and she remembered the parable of the grain of mustard seed, the growth of which the Master likened to that of the kingdom of heaven. It "becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof." Here was food for thought indeed.

The true spiritual knowing had been strong and courageous; and now discouragement was trying to undo the work. What if the winds of error did blow? Could there not still be a holding on, as in the case of the little birds in the tree? But the birds were apparently rejoicing in the very hardest of the tempest! Again came the voice of Truth: Rejoice, rejoice; lo, I am with thee always. The weary one had lost all sense of the storm. She was beginning to look up. Truth had not changed. Her thought was flooded with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the one who had endured "all the rugged way" (Poems, by Mrs. Eddy, p. 14), and of whom it is written that when the storms beat hardest she bent, like the tall grass, only to rise again, knowing all the time error was powerless.

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