Of Grace and Killdeer

Dear WRC,

This past week has been a study week for me.  That means I’ve spent the last few days reading and feverishly writing, trying to crank out the 30-50 pages that I have to turn in next week that will eventually become the first two chapters of my Doctor of Ministry thesis project.  I’ve been thinking deeply about complex concepts and trying to clarify my own understanding of the thousands of pages that I’ve read, but what I really want to tell you about is the killdeer that I saw yesterday.

I was right in the middle of my afternoon writing session when I realized that the book I needed was at home.  I threw on my coat and ran home, grabbed it, and started to read as I came out my side door and went to cross the street.  I looked up from the book to check traffic and that’s when it caught my eye: a bird I had never seen before there on the sidewalk next to the sanctuary.  It was about the size of a robin, maybe a little bigger, light brown coloring on its body, but with a large white band around its neck and a pointier beak.  It was the way it ran that was so intriguing.  It put its head down and tail straight out behind and didn’t hop or bounce, but ran, fluid and level.

It ran around behind the sanctuary.  I followed.  It kept going around into the cemetery.  I followed again.  Each time it would allow me to get no more that 25 feet away and then would run a little further, pretend like it didn’t see me, bob its head up and down almost like it was hiccupping, and wait to see if I followed.  I did.  It ran again.  We repeated our little dance until we were halfway across the cemetery and I conceded.  

I came into my study so I could find out what this new bird was.  Google knew in one try: killdeer.  Killdeer are shorebirds in the Plover family—those legs and beaks perfect for scouring mudflats and sandbars—but they are also known to inhabit other wide-open spaces with low vegetation like golf courses, athletic fields, and, apparently, cemeteries.  While I had never seen one, they are fairly common birds that range across North America.

Still, there’s something about that Killdeer that I just can’t shake.  Part of it is how unexpected it was.  I had no intention of birdwatching.  I was fully engrossed in something else and then: there it was.  There was also something new about it.  I had never seen, or at least identified, a killdeer, and had never seen that beautiful white ring or the way they ran.  It was the way it ran, the motion fluid, yet swift.  It didn’t just fly away.  It almost seemed to want me to follow it.  Such grace.

That’s what it was: grace.  Unexpected, interrupting, new, beautiful, swift, fluid, inviting.  It was grace that met me Wednesday afternoon as I crossed the street with my nose in a book and my mind far, far away.  Grace brought me back to myself, to creation, to wonder.  It made a grown man stalk a bird through a cemetery in broad daylight.  Grace.

“If we are not to simply contribute a religious dimension to the disintegration of our world, join company with the mobs who are desecrating the creation with their hurry and hype in frenzy and noise, we must attend to what we have been given and the One who gives it to us.  One large step in the renewal of the creation today, this field upon which the resurrection Christ plays with such exuberance, is to not take the next step: stand where you are, listen to our Lord: attend…adore.” (Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 118).

In Christ,

Pastor Andy