His Eye Is On The Sparrow

I was walking around the culdesac yesterday afternoon when I saw one of my neighbors firing up his grill. I walked up his driveway and struck up a conversation. I was interested in how his wife was holding up in her job as an ICU nurse. It was crazy hearing about the protocols they go through each time she returns home from a shift. But then he told me about her very first survivor of COVID-19, a 54 year old man who just recently was taken off the ventilator after five weeks. It looks like he’s going to make it. Every other case they have had has been fatal. The one bit of information I forgot to ask was, how many cases they’ve had? Next time I see him, I’ll remember to ask. He did say that some of the cases have been otherwise healthy people, one guy who was an avid runner. But, think about this 54 year old man who spent five weeks on a ventilator, heavily sedated, isolated from every single person who ever loved him. Think of his wife and children, unable to see him, comfort him as he lay in a hospital bed fighting for his life. Think of the disorientation he must have felt to wake up and be informed that it’s been over a month since he was admitted!

The past two evenings Pam and I have sat out on our deck in this marvelous weather we’ve enjoyed, as the sun has set behind the houses in the distance. We are able to lounge around for hours out back thanks to the wonderful people at the Mosquito Authority, by the way. Best money I’ve ever spent. Both nights right around 8:05 every bird in the neighborhood begins singing all at once, a mad, frantic chorus. Each night it happens just before sunset. Our bird watching son in law informs us that it is their night song, an instinct inbred in birds of all kinds which causes them to herald the rising and setting of the sun. We listen to the delightful sound and marvel. Then it becomes dark and the sun catching lanterns on the railings of our deck come on, having stored up solar energy all day, and now illuminating the stained glass cardinals...

In a minute, the stars will come out and the birds will be silent. Then the crickets will begin their dull chirping, rhythmic and enchanting. My wife lifts her cell phone skyward and watches it’s screen reveal the constellations with a new app she has downloaded. Here is Capricorn, there Sagittarius. I watch her face lit up by the soft glow of the screen and ponder my great good fortune that I am not the 54 year old man on the ventilator, or the avid runner who’s life was snuffed out by a virus.

The birds and the crickets know no such virus. They chirp and sing at every sunrise and every sunset all the while running the risk that some creature larger and more powerful than they will devour them. For them, every minute of their existence is a risk. And yet we are told that their creator takes notice when even one of them falls. As I sit in the darkness of my backyard, listening to the hum of the crickets, I take great comfort in the fact that...his eye is on the sparrow.