Crows

The crows were shrieking from our peach tree.  I walked down into our backyard to investigate.  As I approached, a whole flock of the black birds rose from the tree.

I looked over the tree and found that there were still plenty of peaches on the tree.  Then, I noticed that the crows had not been idle.  There were multiple peaches that had gashes in them, just the size of a crow's beak.  Crows apparently don't eat a whole peach.  They just take a peck out of one and the move on to the next one.

It brought me back to earlier in the summer when I had planted a couple of rows of corn only to find the crows pulling them up by the roots and eating the grain of corn off of them.

In both situations I was angry -- angry at these birds.  My mind went to the last chapter of the book of Jonah.  There, Jonah is angry too, because a plant that had shaded him from the heat was destroyed by some insect pest.  God said to Jonah at the very of the book "You have been concerned about this plant, although you did not tend it or make it grow.  It sprang up overnight and died overnight.  And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh in which there are more than one hundred twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left hand -- and also many animals?"

I was different from Jonah, though.  He had concern for a plant that he didn't plant, merely because it was providing him shade.  I had worked hard in my garden and tending my peach tree and yet, maybe my anger at the animal pests in our garden wasn't so different from this Old Testament prophet's anger. 

My wife had some silver tape that I put up in the tree and that seemed to frighten the crows away.  In the end, we had a nice crop of peaches.  The message from the last chapter of Jonah still comes through to me.  Jonah valued something very trivial and saw the important things (the people of Nineveh) as worthless.  I don't know if he ever learned his lesson, but it is something very important for each of us to learn.

It is easy to be deluded into thinking that the things in our life are important.  Whether it is sweet corn and peaches or i phones and new cars, it is easy to focus on trivial things rather than on the things God cares about most.

God cares about people way more than he cares about the "stuff" of the Universe.  He loves them.

We should too.