Sing

Dear Friends,

Sometimes I say Morning Prayer out on my back porch. The thing I love most about my backyard is that it is surrounded by big, old, tall trees. They provide shade through the day, and, in the morning, they provide more birds than you could imagine.

Every day there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of birds that flit from tree to tree. And they sing. They warble and tweet and chirp as the sun comes out, a majestic symphony of God's own making.

And, if you don't know where I live, you might have an image of this being somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere miles from a big road. Somewhere that the birds can go about their beautiful song undisturbed. But that's not where I live.

I live in a very ordinary neighborhood that is really close to Highway 27. As I listen to the birds sing, I hear all kinds of other things, too. I hear motorcycles and trucks insisting they be heard over anything else. A neighbor with a lawnmower roaring much earlier than I'd really prefer. The usual neighborhood traffic, moving up and down the road just on the other side of the house.

And it's there that the birds sing. They aren't offended by the other noise, deciding to take their song elsewhere. They refuse to be drowned out by the hum of life in a busy neighborhood. They sing where they are, and it is glorious.

Our lives and our world have too much going on. There is the steady beat of news, always giving us the details of some new controversy or catastrophe. There is the blazing speed that so often marks our lives, moving from one frantic activity to the next. There are the good and the difficult realities of life, of love, of family, and of friends.

But there's just nowhere else for you to sing. And you need to sing. God has given you a unique set of gifts and abilities. God has given you a story to tell and a song to sing. The temptation is to put off using them, telling it, or singing until the world slows down, the bad news stops coming, and life reaches some mythical place of perfect peace.

That's just not where we actually live. So stop waiting. Learn the song you're called to sing, and do it here and now, in this very real, very messy world that is hungry for a song.

God bless,

Fr. Quinn+

[Photo by Ronaldo de Oliveira on Unsplash.com]