JOHN DEMPSTER: Bird's response to big question gladdens the heart
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I was walking along Druid Road in Inverness towards Hilton Church, my mind distracted by many things. Suddenly, I felt a sense of peace. I looked up, and found I’d reached the church garden, planted beside the pavement as part of the Happy Healthy Hilton project. Somehow the congregation of flowers breathed out calmness and joy.
Walking round the side of the church I looked up at the bell, high on the northern gable. Once, Sunday-by-Sunday, it rang out across the community. ‘Time for church! Time to come and worship God!’ But now, it is silent. Is this because it represents an old, authoritarian model of church which people have largely rejected?
I’ve often found in gardens that the garden-loving God is not far away. Back in March, kneeling to remove weeds, I prayed ‘Where are you God?’ and a bird sang in reply, as though God were answering me in birdsong. ‘I am here!’ Since then, almost every time I’ve heard a bird singing, I’ve been reminded that God is not silent.
I love the prayer David Sim shared at Hilton Church recently about the gentleness of God being visible in people’s lives in the community. It’s revealed in actions expressing warmth, delight, strength, tenderness, determination, compassion, companionship. In these everyday actions, God sings ‘I am here!’
David prayed that we Christians will, as representatives of Jesus ‘tread gently on the earth’. That garden in Druid Road symbolises what Christians are called to be all year round – blossoming, visible in everyday life. One flower by the roadside, and you might walk past it. You’re much more likely to stop when drawn by the gentleness of a whole army of flowers.
In the garden, each bloom is lovely, each flower distinctive, wholly itself, wholly content to be what it is. It is as we Christians become more fully the people we are made to be, saying a perpetual ‘Yes!’ to the love of God, finding healing in brokenness, that our loveliness becomes increasingly visible.
If God speaks through gentle actions in our communities, how much more clearly would you expect God to be heard in the lives of those who claim to be God’s friends. Yet it is not always so. Sometimes we shrink from the gardener’s healing love, and pursue destructive agendas, even in the name of religion.
The Christian message is about finding liberation through faith in Jesus, becoming the flowers the gardener dreams of. God speaks in the birdsong; God speaks in each act of gentleness. The bells which ring across Hilton every day are not in the gable-end belfry, but in the lives of those who together comprise the garden of God’s delight. ‘I am here!’
