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There are some stories that just demand to be repeated. Some of them for me at least are just part of traditional Christmas celebrations. Aside from the essential Scriptural accounting, without which we would have no Christmas at all, what would Christmas be without some reading or film version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol? What modern cinema productions could come even close to It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas? What expectancy can be conjured in the heart and mind of a child without the reading of Clement Moore’s “'Twas the Night before Christmas”? What family fun can be inspired by either reading or attending a staged version of “The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever”? For the serious minded, what better essay
could be pondered than Tom Anderson’s Christmas Essay “His Example,” originally published in American Opinion, an updated and edited version of which was shared with my readers in the Times Examiner last Christmas? What better season of the year to reflect upon the poetic verse of “One Solitary Life”?
The story that is upon my mind this Christmas season is one often told by the aged news commentator Paul Harvey, entitled “The Man and the Birds.” If you have heard it before let me share it with you again; if you haven’t heard it, you will want to add it to your list of Christmas favorites.
The man to who I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge; he was a kind, decent, mostly good man–generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men, but he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff, which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn’t make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man.
“I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound– then another, and then another. It was sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them; he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.
And then, he realized that they were afraid of him. “To them,” he reasoned, “I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me, that I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them–but how?” Because any move he made tended to frighten and confuse them, they just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.
“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.” At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells—“Adeste Fidelis”—listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.
Who [Christ], being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. (Phil. 2: 6-8)
That’s the way we view things—Merry Christmas!
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Summit View Baptist Church is located at 31 N. Highway 25 Bypass, just south of Furman University’s golf course.
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