Hello there, Friend!
Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of this day of showing others how much we love them, I’m dusting off an old email I sent you a while ago. I hope you won’t mind. It seemed appropriate to recall the funny way God let me know how much He loved me when I was experiencing a super stressful time. Hmmmm, you ever feel like that? Look around. Listen. Maybe He’s telling you, too!
Kevin and I lived outside of Atlanta for a whopping year and a half back in the mid-1980s. I’d hardly ever left the Midwest before and I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Don’t get me wrong, the people were super friendly and we bought our first home there and I was excited to set up housekeeping. But, man! Were things different than northern Wisconsin!
For one thing, no one could understand a word I said. And the feeling was mutual. As we were talking with our new neighbors, a sweet little 5-year-old girl looked up at her mom and asked her (about me), “Mama, is she speakin’ Spanish?” I kid you not. I guess “Ya hey” and “Oh, you betcha” don’t translate well into Southern. Despite our different dialects, our little neighborhood group became good friends.
While we lived there, I worked for a company that bought and sold large amounts of oils. I’m talking jumbo tank cars on trains or tanker trucks. I know it sounds totally weird, but the people that made Pringles potato chips had a lot of potato chip oil and, believe it or not, other companies want that stuff. (I don’t want to know why.) My job there was as the front desk receptionist. It was pretty benign: answering phones, typing, office-y stuff. It wasn’t what I had gone to college for, but it helped pay the bills for a while. There were only a handful of employees in the company, and they’d all worked together for another larger company till George, our boss, decided to start his own weird-oil-selling business.
Can I tell you about George? Or maybe you’ve read the book about him? “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Are you familiar? He could be the most mild-mannered, polite person one minute, and then, if something didn’t go quite right, he turned into the scariest, loudest, most red-faced-utterer-of-colorful-oaths you’ve ever seen or heard. The wrath of George always ended up falling upon the shoulders of his assistant, Louise.
Louise had to have had the thickest skin in all of Georgia. George’s explosions happened pretty much daily and they were heard, I’m pretty sure, all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Somehow, anything that went wrong automatically became Louise’s fault and, ooh-baby, did she get an earful, as did we. Everyone else had worked with George for several years, so this was not surprising to them. When they heard the daily eruption, they rolled their eyes and closed their doors. But I was the newbie and wasn’t used to this. I hid under my desk and plugged my ears.
Imagine my mortification, then, when I learned that Louise was taking a two-week vacation and I was the lucky winner-winner-chicken-dinner to assume her responsibilities! (Cue the heart palpitations.)
The week before Louise’s vacation was to start, George called me into his office. I slunked (not a proper word, but it’s exactly what I did) down the hall and sat across from him, trying not to shake too much. The only thing I remember from that encounter was that he warned me I would have to “sink or swim” in Louise’s absence. Not exactly the pep talk I needed at the moment. I muttered some unintelligible reply and zombie-walked back to my desk. I’m pretty sure I was as white as a ghost. Jenny, my officemate, asked if I was OK, and I assured her I was “just fine.” You know us Midwesterners, we always say we’re “just fine” even when we think we’re about to die—no sense bothering anyone else with our troubles.
Except I was reeeeeeeally troubled. On a scale of one to ten, where one was “kind of concerned” and ten was “deeply distressed,” I was about a 329.
But then something remarkable happened.
From where I sat at my desk, I looked out the front door of the office. It was a clear glass door with a large adjacent floor-to-ceiling window. As I looked straight out of the glass, I whispered one of the shortest prayers in the history of prayer: “Please help.” I’m not sure if I was even talking to God. I wasn’t even very close to God at that point in my life. I was talking to the world at large. But when I said those words, a bird flew out of nowhere and landed on the sidewalk right in front of the door where I could see it. It moved its head around as birds do, looking like it was looking back at me. At the moment that the bird landed there, I felt a sudden feeling of peace. It was the strangest yet most welcomed thing. The bird stayed there only a minute, long enough for me to exhale the breath I’d held for five days, feel that other-worldly, inexplicable peace, and then it flew away.
“God?” I wondered, “Was that You?”
Somewhere deep down, it felt like that was God’s way of getting my attention and saying, “I love you! I’ve got you!” Now, did the bird land there coincidently at the same time I said, “Please help”? Maybe, but at that moment, it felt like it was a little gift from God – a visible, tangible, totally organic anti-anxiety treatment. And now birds are God and my secret little “love language.”
I know for a fact that not everyone loves birds as I do. My friend Susan can’t stand birds! I’d say she “hates” them, but as we all know, hate is a strong word. She super-dee-duper dislikes them. I bet you can guess what movie she saw way back when that caused her avian aversion! Yup! That one! However, she has her own love language with God—butterflies! When her mom passed away, she and her sister saw a butterfly and it was an instant reminder that Jesus loved her. She feels that special heavenly connection whenever she sees a butterfly, like I do when I see a bird.
Do you and God have a “love language?” I’d love to hear what it is if you feel like sharing. Maybe it’s a beautiful sunrise. Maybe it’s your dog’s sweet face. It could be anything that helps you draw nearer to God.
And in case you might be someone who is thinking, “God doesn’t love me like that,” let me reassure you, He most definitely does.
A little bird told me.
Written with Love – – Patti XOXO
“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed,
yet My UNFAILING LOVE for you will not be shaken
nor My covenant of peace be removed,”
says the Lord, who has compassion on YOU.”
Isaiah 54:10