Good News – Paul Harvey and the Reason for the Season

“Jesus is the reason for the season.”  I always heard that, and it’s an easy little aphorism to say.  However, a simple story helps me remember that this isn’t exactly the case.  Maybe you’ve heard Paul Harvey tell it.


The Man and the Birds

by Paul Harvey [abridged]

He was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. And so he stayed home while they went to the Christmas eve service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window.  But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. He put on a coat [and] tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he fetched bread crumbs,  making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs.   He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms.  Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how?  Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.  “If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. And he sank to his knees in the snow.


When I heard that story I suddenly realized that Jesus isn’t the reason for this season.

We are.

One Comment Add yours

  1. joanneviola says:

    So very grateful each one of us is the very reason He came. Blessings!

    Like

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