He is Fierce for Our Freedom

An Eastern Starling flew down our chimney sometime in the night and started fluttering around our firebox, enclosed by the brick in the back and a glass front .  She kept fluttering around, getting herself stuck around bricks and trying to fly back up the black Alice in Wonderland hole where she came from.  I couldn't take it any longer.  I was having a birthday brunch for a friend in about an hour and I just couldn't imagine enjoying ourselves with a bird in captivity clanging around in the room adjacent.  Or at least, that's what I told myself.


I could tell that Andrew didn't care.  He was ok with the bird dying in the flue and then carrying his dead body out to the ravine to a "resting place" once he was at peace.  Andrew came from a hunting family and I've gotten very comfortable with that lifestyle.  I was quickly assimilated after seeing newly shot, skinned rabbits in the sink on my first morning sleeping over at my in-laws.  Even my children are fairly comfortable with the death of animals, watching what we call "circle of life" nature shows on the Discovery Channel.  Somehow, I could not bear the thought of this bird dying in my house, I dared to beg a very exhausted pastor husband who was Monday-morning-tired.


He came to my rescue.


Andrew got out his largest salmon/steelhead catching fishing net, opened the glass front and positioned the net over the front.  The bird walked in and then, unconvinced her freedom came in the form of black plastic netting, she promptly walked back into the firebox. 


Hmmmm. Time for a new plan of attack.


A few minutes later, the bird herself flew out from around the net and into the office/playroom, furiously beating her wings on the windows.  Over and over, Andrew kept flushing her out of corners where she would get herself stuck.  After that, she flew behind the huge computer cabinet and then into the corner behind the fish tank.  Stuck again.  I ran to get the broom and tried the help flush her out.  Again she kept flying from corner to corner.  We were adamant she had to go before the brunch...and then the kids would come home from preschool.  I wanted this bird to get out alive! 


The entire time, I'm getting seriously emotional...(and I am not even pregnant, a clear indication something else was going on here. )


I remember saving a songbird from the mouth of the neighbor's cat and making her comfortable in a shoebox until our friends' vetrinarian dad could come home from work and diagnose the problem.  More weapiness.  (I swear I'm not usually such a drama queen!)


The bird flew across the small room into a bookcase and got stuck there.  What now?  Do we reach in?  "I'll get some gloves for you," I said.  Plastic, too thin.  "My canvas ones are out in the garage," Andrew said.  I'm nearly crying by now.  OK. I got the gloves and brought them to him.  Protected, Andrew reached into the bookcase, brought out the starling and carefully carried him out the backdoor, saying to the bird as he released him, "Be free!"  I dissolved into weeping.


Oh.  That's what this was about.  A bird being freed is the theme of my sister's healing...and Freedom has been the theme of my Lent.  "It is for freedom that Christ has set you free." Galatians 5:1  It is an immediate sign that God has a word for me.  It's been happening constantly for six weeks. 

Then it hit me.  This is just a tiny picture of the kindness and fierceness that Christ has for our freedom.  He wants us to be healed of the gangrenous deadness in our spirits and be resurrected new creations.  He wants to fiercely show our other lovers (as the Old Testament prophet Hosea teaches) the door, kick them out for good, afraid to slink back into our lives when we're vulnerable.


My sister wrote about her healing in a memoir in which she talked about a word that I've always had trouble with: "wrath."  She wrote that she once gave God permission to send his wrath against everything that was standing in the way between herself and God.  Wow, now that's gutsy.  I looked inside myself, do I have that kind of guts?  Am I fierce like the Living God for my own freedom...or do I kinda wanna be free. 


If Andrew and I had kinda wanted the bird free, she would still have been fluttering around in windows that looked like the way out but were new dead ends, albeit pretty, sunshiny ones.  We had to be fiercely focused on the end goal.


I'm thankful our God is fierce for us, fierce for our freedom and for the women He made us to be.   I can't imagine not growing, not getting mature.  How depressing!  How depressing to still be dealing with the same STUFF thirty years from now.  I never want to leave my learning empty-handed.  God, thank You for loving me enough to be fierce for my freedom.  Help me to become fierce too.

Luminous ones, becoming more luminous all the time, what is it that our God wants to free you of?