A Righteous Generation

I just filled the bird feeders. It’s been nearly a week since I filled them last. I usually buy the bird seed in bags, but this last time I bought the bird seed in tubs because the birds were going through a bag of it every other day.

Apparently the birds don’t like this feed as well. How can a creature who eats seed for a living be so finicky?  What does the bird want? White cheddar seasoning?

I love to sit in my red chair by the window in the mornings and watch the birds. It reminds me of an old vet friend who used to sit in his leather recliner in his Cumberland Gap home watching the cardinals and nuthatches fight for food. He said he had a pileated woodpecker that would come to visit from time to time but I never saw it. Sometimes if while we were having our morning coffee and birdwatching, he would jump up and grab his gun by the back door. It’s always a little nerve-wracking when a veteran jumps and grabs a gun. But it was a harmless gun, meant to scare away the squirrels.

We don’t have cardinals here in Oregon, much to my regret. It’s rare for me to even see a Blue Jay. Most of our birds are some variation of brown. Although, sometimes, the beautiful finches come but only if I put out the bagged seed and not the tub seed. I’m never buying the tub seed again.

My fascination with birds didn’t come with age. Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve been taken with the songbirds of Georgia.

I grew up waking up to the songbird.

And honestly, I feel as though my whole life has been lived in that vein — an overwhelming sense of God’s blessing all around me.

Remarking on a jacket I was wearing at the time, a male student said, “You always dress so happy.”

I am happy, I said. Most of the time.

Oh. I mean I have my moments of complete and utter frustration. That happened this week when I received a call of concern from my mother-in-law who had heard from her mother about this “news” report. For the record, I didn’t know anything about this prior to that call. But I had my meltdown and moved along.

I did the same thing yesterday when I got out of my car and dropped my iPhone, shattering it. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to replace a shattered iPhone? It seems I can waste money without even trying.

I was disappointed with myself. Upset. Frustrated. But I did not curse the devil who made me do it.

There is a time in my life when I might have done that.

Somebody should have probably locked me up and thrown away the key during those years. It was during those years that I had that dream that we retell over and over again in this family. The one in which I was having some nightmare — a common occurrence in those days — and Tim, concerned, reached out to wake me up and I came flying at him, arms waving and yelling “GET BEHIND ME, SATAN!”

I was having this dream that I was fighting a demon by sprinkling real blood over everything. When Tim reached out I mistook him for the demon. It was a nightmare. Now it’s just a funny tale.

The highly regarded Welshman and pastor Martin Lloyd Jones asked, “Does it grieve you that we are living in such a godless age?”

I’m not sure if Jones was referring to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s or the hedonism that followed it.

But as I watched the birds, I got to wondering, do you think there has ever been a generation of people about whom we could say, Now that was a Righteous generation?

If so, which generation do you think that was?