At first glance it looked
like a giant smudge on the new glass of the door to our deck. Moving in to
investigate more closely I realized it was something else entirely. A large
bird of some sort, perhaps a mourning dove, had apparently been startled while
pecking at dropped birdseed on the wooden boards under the bird feeder, and had
flown smack into the glass in its haste to get away. Amazingly, the bird’s
image was left behind in intricate detail in the dust on the door.
Birds fly into that window
all the time, usually leaving just a feather or two stuck to the glass in their
wake. The lucky ones bounce off and sit gathering their wits about them for a
few minutes before eventually taking off again in a safer direction. Others
succumb to broken necks or the damage to their battered bodies in just a matter
of minutes, leaving me to dispose of them before the dogs have a field day with
their feather remains.
Never before had I seen
anything like this. From wingtip to outspread wingtip the bird’s likeness was
pictured before me, down to the feathery plumage of its torso. The dawning
morning light was just right to illuminate the sight against the remaining dark
surroundings, and I quickly grabbed my camera in the hope of somehow capturing
the picture before it became less visible as the day wore on.
Perhaps it registered with me
so strongly because I know a lot of people whose life circumstances are similar
to that bird’s experience. Eagerly taking off on some new venture, they have
barely gotten off the ground when they’ve slammed into an invisible obstacle,
falling back to sit stunned and shaken and wondering what on earth has happened
to them. Many times their dreams succumb at that point to the blow they’ve
received.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find a
bird carcass on the deck boards that morning. Surely if it hit the glass with
the force needed to leave the image it did, it could not have survived. But
things are not always as they seem. Perhaps the purpose behind that dusty
imprint was simply to remind me that a seemingly dead future can be
resurrected, and that a promise can live beyond the grave.
God’s left such reminders
before. The Shroud of Turin is one such example, a piece of cloth said to have
been wrapped around Jesus’ body at His burial, bearing in blood the features of
the crucified Savior. Yet it was set aside at His rising, His abandoned grave
clothes all that was left in the tomb on that first Easter morning.
While there is much debate
about the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity, there’s no disputing that Christ’s
image was imprinted on the hearts of the disciples that were discussing the
events surrounding His death as they trudged wearily to Emmaus. When Jesus
suddenly appeared walking alongside them, disguising His true identity but
discussing the events of the last few days and explaining their significance,
those same hearts burned within them, helping them to eventually understand and
believe, and infusing their lives with new hope.
God simply does same thing
with us. He walks beside us in the midst of our distress, encouraging and
explaining things to us, although often we don’t recognize His voice or the
form in which He appears. As a new day dawns we are surprised to see an imprint
of His presence left somewhere where we’d stumble across it, and suddenly we
realize that He was with us in the darkness all along and hasn’t left us, as we supposed. Hope infused and hearts beating
wildly within us, we grab our resurrected vision and rush as the two disciples
did to tell somebody else of what we’ve just experienced. Not only is the
gospel thus spread, but our expectancy rises from the dead, and our dreams
suddenly take flight once more.
“On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that
enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up
death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces…”
(Isaiah 25:8 NIV)
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