HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW

“..if God’s eye is on the sparrow, I know he watches over me.” With
this phrase wringing in her ears, a woman named Civilla Martin penned the
famous hymn, His Eye Is On The Sparrow, a cherished part of Gospel
music. It came about from a meeting she and her husband had with a
crippled woman named Mrs. Doolittle. They were vacationing in upper
New York State in 1905. Remember, those were the days when there
were no ramps, and so forth, for people who had difficulty managing steps
and curbs or were in wheel chairs. Instead of being bitter and pessimistic,
Mrs. Doolittle was upbeat, cheerful and her secret was simply this, “...if
God’s eye is on the sparrow, I know he watches over me.”

I wonder if in her hours of musing about her life, these words came
from a sense of the Lord’s directive to his apostles as they set out on their
anything but easy mission in his name. He gave them counsel on how to
offer and receive kindness, generosity, hospitality, how and what to
preach, and how to announce healing from evil spirits and physical
suffering. The disciples must have been eager and wide-eyed to begin
their first assignment and to be trusted by Jesus with such a noble and
important work.

Jesus, however, was no smooth-talking salesman, spinning a cheerful
tale of glory and success for his followers. Theirs would be a journey filled
with successes and failures, joys and suffering, not only emotionally but
also physically at the hands of others. Their faith in him and what he
stood for would be tested severely. What he tried to tell them was to be
alert to what they were about and why, so that they stand in the face of it
all without crumbling, and, above all, without doubting themselves and
their Lord.

We might have wished Jesus had offered all of us a simple and safe
path through life, protected from all danger and illness through suffering,
but that is not what he does, because that isn’t the way life is for any of
us. Even he died on a cross at the hands of people who misunderstood
and opposed him.

So, as followers, we need not expect our paths will be
magically protected from all harm because we are followers of Christ.
The truth is that we need to anticipate and prepare ourselves for
those things that are hard for us to take, suffering, rejection, like it or not.

This doesn’t mean that when things are going well for us, that we wait “for
the other shoe to drop,” as the expression goes. No way! It is just that
our lives are like a wheel, sometimes going well for us, sometimes lousy.
When they are going well, we need to realize that things will become lousy
again at some point, and prepare ourselves for that, and when they are
lousy, we need to remember when things went well and were good and that the good times will come again.

Hope this will be an encouragement. :)