The Parable of the Pigeon

God has an interesting way of bringing things to my attention. He will just keep putting the same thing in front of me over and over and over again until the light bulb turns on.

I have been really busy lately. Between working full time plus on a stressful project, finishing my Master's degree, along with all the day to day stuff raising babies and unpacking, etc. I started feeling sick in early August - running a fever and feeling very run down but chalked it up to all the moving. I kept taking Tylenol for the fever and still going to work and school and started a new Bible study at church.

After nine days, I decided to bite the bullet and go into the doctor and they determined that I had pneumonia in my left lung. I stayed home the afternoon and started my antibiotics and tried to rest a bit. My problem is that I am a little hyper and the minute I was feeling a small bit better, I would do too much until I felt ill again. I ended up needing two rounds of antibiotics, a trip to the emergency room, before I was diagnosed with pleurisy, an infection in the lining of the lung. My right side ribs hurt so badly that I could not sleep at night, but I still kept trying to keep up.

In my Bible study, the teacher told us that God is the same today as He was yesterday. She mentioned that He still speaks in parables and shared one with us.

The following day, I got home from work to find my neighbor waiting for me. She said she had found a bird and thought it was sick because it wouldn't fly and had been hanging out in her garage for a few hours. I offered to call some local wildlife rescues and see what to do and we were found out it was a pigeon that was most likely lost. We caught the bird with the help of many more neighbors and kept him in a cat carrier overnight to rest. I researched some more on pigeons.com and was able to determine which kind of pigeon he was based on his tags. I so wanted to see this little bird make it home safe. I talked to a woman the next day who advised me to release the bird and he would go home on his own, but when I released him, he just stayed on our swingset for the entire day. We chatted while I worked in the dining room and he was very sweet company.

That afternoon, after a series of phone calls, I was able to track down the bird's owner and he came and picked him up. He told me that this little bird was about 200 days old and had just flown in his first race. He had been shipped to Missouri and had to fly over 250 miles home. However, he had overshot it and flown 12 miles too far to get to my home. By the time he got here, he was exhausted and needed several days rest to recover enough to fly again.

My friend, Sue, from Bible study had stopped by and I was chatting with her about all the sickness and the pigeon, etc and she asked me if I thought there was a parable in there. I sat up thinking about it all night and found it so interesting that this bird would show up here and this time, tired because he tried to go too far, to do too much.