The Bird - A Practical Lesson In Humility

Prefacing Note: This is a little piece that I wrote back in 2013 that was published on my Psalty Coffee blog. [Oblate Offerings and Psalty Coffee have since been privatized and are no longer available to the public.] 

The year was 1984.

It was springtime in Houston. I had been there four years. There were plenty of times that I wanted to pack it in and call it quits. Especially about the halfway point. Those that had endured and persevered referred to it as hitting the wall.

I kept pushing against the wall until I made my way through it.

The day was one of those Senior Sermon days … an opportunity for seniors graduating in a few weeks to take to the pulpit and deliver what they hoped would be their best sermon to their ministerial peers and fellow students. Not only to their peers and fellow students, but also to the doctorate-holding professors that had groomed and schooled them.

It was honestly something that created the nervous shakes and episodes of diarrhea for some of the guys.

The three graduating seniors on stage for the day … perhaps “in the pulpit” would better express the occasion … drew straws to see where they would offer up their senior sermons.

The student body was divided into thirds. Two of the thirds went to one or the other of the large classrooms. The other third took their place in that beautiful campus chapel with the pipe organ, all the stained-glass windows, old worn wooden pews, and exposed timbers that held the roof in the air. Everyone always insisted that it did not matter which straw they drew. Well, everyone always hoped they would draw the long straw and go into the chapel.

I drew the long straw.

Yes. Me. A profligate that had willingly and generously squandered his youth in the hog pens of life was about to graduate from an extremely conservative evangelical Bible college and embark on a pastoral preaching mission in that denomination.

There I was shining like a new penny. I was dressed in a new suit and polished wing tips, groomed and schooled in Bible, Theology, Homiletics, Psychology, Sociology, and an extensive list of other studies that were considered requirements to graduate with the school’s representative brand.

I already had some experience under my belt. Over the course of those student years, I had numerous opportunities to preach in local churches and I was on the regular rotation schedule at the Star of Hope, one of the homeless missions downtown.

I will admit that I was a little nervous but nothing that would generate shaking hands or explosive episodes of diarrhea. 

An opening prayer. A couple of hymns. I delivered “the sermon”. Another hymn and a closing prayer.

Some of my ministerial peers patted me on the back. Younger aspiring ministerial students shook my hand and thanked me. Some of my professors shook my hand and offered their congratulatory affirmations. Accolades have a way of swelling the head. Swollen heads make space for pride to move in, and it definitely moved in as I made my way to Pop’s Place, the campus café, for refreshments.

It was a beautiful spring day. We talked while we walked after exiting the chapel. Mostly about my splendid homiletically and biblically sound three-point preaching performance.

A mockingbird was singing its happy song in a large live oak tree nearby, and, as we passed under the oak, the mockingbird dropped a large load of warm wet squat on the right shoulder of my new suit.

I have never forgotten that bird … something far from the raven that fed the prophet … but … I think … sent nonetheless.