I looked up from the exam in front of me. Pages upon pages were stacked in a neatly stapled pile. Odd Hebrew consonants and minuscule syntactical symbols stared up at me menacingly, daring me to bring order from the chaos. I’d been glued to my seat for nearly two hours, my hand cramping from lines and lines of cursive. I tensed up every time I turned a page, bracing for a fresh wave of panic as I took in the new problems. “Did I even study this? Maybe the professor got the advanced class’s exam mixed up with ours.”
Heaving a sigh, I looked up from my desk. I glanced desperately out the classroom window for something to help me distract my mind and reset. Suddenly, I noticed little shapes hopping up and down on the school lawn. Tiny birds the size of fuzzy ping-pong balls were bouncing around, pulling at reluctant bits of their next meal.
In a flash, Christ’s words from Matthew 6:26 came to mind: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
The Bird and the Word
One of the things I find so remarkable about Christ’s sermon in Matthew 6 is just how benign his examples are. Birds. He tells us to look at birds. I don’t know about you, but somewhere along the path to getting older, I began to stop paying attention to birds. I’m sure cell phones and social media and all the usual culprits of modern distraction are blameable in their own ways, but I also think that birds and grass and flowers of the field just fade into the background for most of us. Things so ordinary often require disruption to make them perceptible again.
There are a whole host of reasons why we may be anxious or anxiety-prone. Being anxious is sometimes due to a choice we make—like not studying enough for an exam. Sometimes it’s not—like sudden abdominal pain, loss, or a chronic anxiety disorder. But it’s always miserable. No matter how constant your anxiety may feel, no matter how steady the hum of insecurity and perplexity may be in the background to your life, there is a frame of mind to which we should always be called back.
C.S. Lewis spoke of this experience in The Problem of Pain and likened our lives to a house of cards that comes tumbling down in the face of hardship. The tumble and mess, though painful, is so often used by the Lord to draw our attention back to a right frame of mind: a frame of mind that recognizes our fundamental, unavoidable, and profound neediness as creatures. In the midst of the anxious tumble that our lives can so often be, Christ draws our attention to the birds of the field.
What’s a Bird Got to Do With It?
God’s general providence is described as “his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing of all his creatures and all their actions” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 11). This is a helpful summary of the Bible’s teaching about God’s reign and rule over all things, but how often do we live as if it isn’t true? What we often miss, precisely because it is so ordinary, is the reality that there’s never a time when God’s attention slackens. His arms don’t get shaky. He doesn’t need to adjust his footing. He needs no people, items, or otherwise-living-creatures to more firmly get his grip on our lives. Behind it all, upholding it all, our God is there. And God in the flesh, the Lord Jesus himself, tells us here in Matthew 6 to notice that his reign and rule is seen even in the life of birds.
They don’t sow. They don’t reap. They don’t tug on their garden boots and pull weeds. They don’t mail out resumes and cover letters. They’ve never once in their tiny lives ever had to send an email “circling back.” And, yet, the Lord provides for all their needs despite the fragility and passing nature of their existence.
Christ’s point is that birds are of less consequence in the grand scheme of the universe than we are—“what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:4). Notice it or not, acknowledge it or not, God has sustained you in every way thus far in the journey of your life. Not all of our anxieties will be as relatively minor as a Hebrew exam. In this life, we may face depths of pain and loss that shake us to our bones—perhaps despair of life itself (2 Cor. 1:8). A failed test may result in a different future than we anticipated, and the valley of the shadow of death can sometimes feel like more of a home than a detour. But in and through all of it, the Lord gives you himself as your strength and provision because he cares for you.
Even when the house of cards comes tumbling down and our life lays in heaps like broken toys, the Lord draws our gaze to the birds of the air. There they rest upon everlasting arms. And there the Lord reminds us, “are you not of more value, to me, than they?”
