You know how the fall leaves get swooshed around by the fall winds and you get this beautiful circular movement of flowing leaves all around the streets and sidewalks? Doesn't it just make your insides warm and light? Well we have that same thing here... only the beautiful orange and red leaves are pigeon feathers.
There's a lot to get accustomed to here... from the A/C unit that sounds like a freight train (hey built in white noise for the babies!) to the freezing cold turned scalding hot showers (114 apartments operating off of 2 water heaters!!)... and most of it is funny if not mildly irritating. It's like real mission field living sometimes!!
However, there is one aspect of this mission field living that my flesh does not find funny... and that is the pigeons. I don't know why but they bring out the worst in me! When my baby is picking up pigeon feathers that blow in from outside or when they are stuck to her little hands from just being on the patio and she tries to eat them... that is just gross!!
I was sitting out on the patio the other morning before the kids got up and all the while these pigeons are flocking left and right... and walking joyfully all around me. OH! The sudden flesh that those pigeons bring to the surface!! I was reading Esther and marveling at someone so willing to risk her very life for the sake of her people, and in the same breath of "Lord may I have the heart of Esther! To count your people so dear that my own life would be laid down!!" came "Those cursed rats with wings!" Same sentence... true testimony! So I caught my bipolar ways and began praying, "Ok Lord, give me love for the pigeons!" And as I sat there staring at these pigeons, the sun began hitting the building next to me... little by little the warm rays began resting on more and more of the roof. Each pigeon began moving into the sunlight, but there wasn't room for all of them. Those stuck in the shade kept pushing and nudging to be in the warmth of the light.
It may seem silly, but I took that picture and praised God for redeeming my dirty and diseased soul. He has indeed rescued me from darkness and delivered me into His marvelous light. The feelings I now have toward the pigeons are praises to my God, that He would look on me... a sick and troubled spirit, unclean and used up, no real good to anybody in the state I was in... YET still he saw value. He set my feet upon a rock and gave me a new song. I got pieces of Psalm 40 tattooed on my back when He became my God... and declared never to turn on Him again. Oh the grace that has been shown to me... the goodness and forgiveness I could never earn. Lord may I NEVER forget that I was a pigeon.
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