We Still Have Hope

When the guineas came through my yard, they sounded like they were laughing or holding some kind of conversation I wasn’t invited to be a part of. It’s fine. None of my business what they were going on about. Sky might’ve been falling or something. Who cares?

It’s fallen before.

At one time there were twelve of them, and then there were five. Eventually, I moved from that house, and I don’t see them anymore, but while I was there, it was during COVID, and the world was different.

The neighbor who owned the guineas also had a couple of fairly large dogs who apparently had an unhealthy obsession with slightly fancy chickens. It’s not inconceivable the guineas were plotting ways to stay alive, but if so, it didn’t seem to be working out for them.

I don’t think they’re the rocket surgeons of the fowl world.

I’ve never heard a guinea sing, and I’m not really sure they can.

It seems like those particular guineas had probably gotten to the point where they’d accepted their eventual fate. Not too much to sing about, if they had the ability to croak one out.

Other birds still sing though, now, and back in the days of COVID. Amazing, really, when you think of all we’ve been through in the last five years.

Still, a lot is going on in our world right now. I get out of my house again, way more than I did when I was forced to work from home for the three years beginning in 2020. Before COVID came along I dreamed of a job where I could work from home. After I was forced into it, not so much.

It’s isolating, and I’m still trying to navigate the damage. I retired in July of 2023 out of self-defense.

It’s still surprising to me when I sit on my porch and happen to hear a bird break into song. “Y’all still do that?” I think. They do.

These days aren’t the first when birds belting out a tune surprised me. After my dad got killed when I was 18, I remember how astonished I was to find that birds had the AUDACITY to keep singing when he was gone. The world had a lot of nerve to keep on turning as if the most catastrophic event ever hadn’t just occurred.

Now I find comfort in the song, as opposed to then, when I found it atrocious.

God never bothered to ask my permission to let the world continue in any way He saw fit to let it go on. I thought He should. I kind of thought I mattered more to Him more than I apparently did. We all think we’re special, and it kind of destroys us to realize we aren’t.

We’re all born to die. Nobody gets out of life alive. You’ve heard that, haven’t you? It’s true.

However, when you consider the sad state we’ve all gotten ourselves in, it’s easy to imagine that the great Almighty would naturally just leave us to our own devices, as well He should. We’ve certainly earned whatever we get.

Even when it seems to be getting better in some ways, you can just watch the news to realize how far we’ve slipped into inhumanity and moral degradation.

We’ve gone a long way backwards, a long way down, a long way in the wrong direction. But Matthew 6:26 says, “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

He takes care of the birds, and they’ve done nothing at all to earn or deserve it.

Maybe, birds sing to let us know life goes on. Maybe they sing to remind us that God loves us even though we can’t do anything to earn or deserve it. Maybe they sing to remind us God loves us when we forget to love ourselves.

I don’t know much about why birds continue to sing when there seems to be so little to sing about.

One thing I do know for sure.

As long as birds still sing, we still have hope.