One Bright Red Bird (redux)
One Bright Red Bird (Redux)
I wrote The Beautiful Ache in 2007. It’s a personal book, but its topic—longing—is universal. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” said C. S. Lewis, “the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”a
Things can change a lot over the years, but the longing expressed in at least one chapter of The Beautiful Ache remains. “One Bright Red Bird” expresses the desire to hope against all hope . . . to believe the unbelievable, to have confidence in the unseen.
Back then, I wrote of the desire for a husband and children—a family of my own. That longing, for a never-married, childless woman, can be intense. Mine certainly was. Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed when I read those pages now. A part of me wishes I hadn’t said so much. But what I wrote was true.
You might think, many years hence, that because I am still unmarried and childless, I believe less in hope. But you’d be wrong. The power of hope is stronger in me than it’s ever been, regardless of what is hoped for. Hope is powerful stuff indeed. And while I can only see in part, God sees the whole of my story—from beginning to end.
Last weekend in the little hamlet of Round Top, Texas, I wandered into a tiny shop called Blue Door Decor and spied . . . one bright red bird. When I saw this cardinal, I thought immediately of the book’s chapter and decided that this tiny icon of hope was going home with me. The bird is perched on the top of the armoire in my living room as a reminder that more exists than I can see, and that my God is still a God of hope. A cardinal is not ashamed of his color. This red bird reminds me to not be ashamed of my hope. My God knows. He sees. He is good.
In The Beautiful Ache I write, “‘Don’t make me hope,’ I’ve said to God more than once. ‘It hurts too much.’ But hoping is fertile ground, and having hope is much more reasonable than not having it. Especially with a God like ours whose specialty is nothing less than the impossible.”b
I stand by those words. Still.
I wait confidently for God to save me, and my God will certainly hear me.
Micah 7:7
a C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 137–38.
b Leigh McLeroy, The Beautiful Ache (Brenham, TX: Lucid Books, 2010), 100.
From the book
