I Was Shocked!

I was so shocked. Kill? That would be worse than criminal.

I cannot remember the rest of the rant, but it was part of a conversation of a large group of people after church one morning. The church I went to around 15 years ago. Definitely not the church I’m a part of today. Kill?

She was a lady you wouldn’t really want to argue with. Run from, maybe, but not argue with. “Every morning at 5am, a blackbird starts singing outside my bedroom window. It wakes me. I cannot sleep after that. I could kill it! I wish someone would kill it.”

I was so shocked. For most of my life, and especially for the 40 years I have lived in my rural Norfolk cottage, a blackbird has sung outside my bedroom window almost every morning. Well, spring, summer and autumn. Loudly. Melodically. Incredibly beautifully. From early in the morning during summer months. And I love it.

The month of May in England is a sheer delight. Our gardens and hedgerows are bursting with new life, colour, vitality, and fragrance, and I am entranced, captivated, enraptured, year after year. And the blackbird sings.

I have been particularly blessed with a team of blackbirds, serenading me day after day, and year after year. One stations itself outside my bedroom window, perched in a hawthorn tree, whilst it’s companion proceeds to the top of the garden and takes position in an oak beside the summerhouse. Another would fly to my Aylsham practice, and find a convenient perch outside the surgery window. Seriously, I would have blackbird song to wake me at sunrise (at 3.42am this morning), blackbird song to accompany my prayers whilst I spent a devotional time in the summerhouse, and a serenade most of the day from outside my surgery window.

What a wonderful and amazing world in which we live. In just this past week, we have had greater spotted woodpeckers swinging on the nut feeders, and hanging on our sitting room window and staring in. Beside us on the patio, a mother blackbird feeds her fledgling youngster, whilst blue tits do the same outside my study window. A squirrel came within a few feet in order to drink from our patio water feature, a pied wagtail waves its hind quarters at us playfully from across the lawn, and only a week or two ago, Wendy disturbed a fox, sleeping behind our summerhouse.

What an amazing world is planet Earth. I confess that I am a creationist, as I do not have the faith to believe ‘it all came from nothing’ and ‘it’s all developed from blobs in an early ocean’. I know something about teeth! I am in awe at how differently calcified and structured enamel and dentine develop from soft pink tissue to form teeth. Just one example. And so much more. I cannot believe it just randomly happens.

Don’t kill the melodious blackbird – it is part of God’s creation, and I praise Him for it, and enjoy it every day. Join with me. Enjoy. Praise Him!