This is one of those stories – strange, yet true.

On a lovely Thursday evening in June, Tim, Esther and I were in our downstairs den/office where we spend most of our time these days, when we heard the loud familiar bang of a bird hitting one of our windows. I cringed, hoped the bird would be OK, and kept on at whatever I was doing on the computer. Esther looked out the window to see if she could see anything. Tim commented that it was a big hit; we all knew it probably wouldn’t be pretty.

As Esther looked out the window she saw some small movements from our walkway and said, “I think it’s going to be OK.” Tim went to the window to look but couldn’t see it, so Esther helped, “It’s there on the walkway – that green bird.”

Green bird? Tim looked and sure enough – it was definitely a green bird! He went running out the front door and then called back for a towel. As I brought the towel for him to wrap the stunned avian in we were surprised to see it was some kind of parrot. It must be someone’s stray pet.

The bird gradually regained its senses in the plastic tote we supplied for a temporary home. Once it became more alert and began eating some food we borrowed a cage from friends until we could find the owners.

We advertised on-line, checked out some local pet stores, talked to a man in our neighborhood with an aviary, and watched the “lost” section of our local paper. Nothing. After a week of not a single lead we went out and bought a cage for our new pet, a peach-fronted conure we named “Bang!” It’s not a very dignified name, but it reminds us how he got here – and that’s good.

Tim has talked over the years about having a pet bird someday. I’ve never really been on board – I know they’re messy and I’ve been pretty happy pet-less since our dog died in 2008. But as Tim jokingly says, “I asked God for a bird and he threw one against our house!”

I’m not certain that’s how it went down, but I know that God knew Tim was losing one of his best friends in June due to a work transfer, and I know that God knew Tim always wanted a bird, and I know that God knew there wasn’t a chance we would spend so much money on a pet bird! So the fact that we now have a peach-fronted conure in our home makes me shake my head in some kind of disbelief and wonder that maybe God did this just to “love on” Tim.

We were driving back from the church one evening not long after Bang arrived and noticed a house for sale. It was one of the houses Tim had looked at 15 years ago - before we bought the house where we are now. We were musing how our life would have been different if we had bought that house instead of the one we did. “Well one thing is that we wouldn’t have had a parrot fly into it,” I mused. Tim was certain, “I think we would have!”

There’s a thought. I’m not sure we can define God’s working in such a matter so definitively, and yet I know what it is to be loved by our Heavenly Father, and I wouldn’t put it past Him to do something like that to love on one of His children.

Simply Susan