When I’m Faced With the Wrongness of the World

I stood under my favorite tree—a river birch whose trailing branches remind me of a willow, and stared up into the canopy of the maples on the hill. Something didn’t look right. Where normally everything was leafy green, I saw something big and dark, like a shadow. I squinted trying to make it out. It was too big to be a squirrel’s nest. Could it be a big trash bag, blown up into the top branches during one of our sudden summer storms? I walked closer and squinted again, wishing I had my glasses on as I don’t see well from a distance. I drew in a sharp breath as I suddenly understood the shape. It was a dead bird—a massive one, upside down with its wings outstretched. I looked away. It seemed irreverent, terribly wrong for that bird to be suspended dead in the branches. It had clearly been there a long time, dried out in the blazing sun. A shell of its former self, it caught each breeze like a kite, but the branches held it fast. 

At first I thought it was a goose but later realized the regal shape belonged to that of a Great Blue Heron. I knew we had to get it down. I couldn’t stand to think of it there. But it was so high up, we would need to hire someone with a bucket truck to come and remove it. We found someone who could do it, but it would be a few days before they could come out. Until then, the bird would have to stay where it was.

During that waiting time I couldn’t stop thinking about that beautiful bird God had made. A bird like a king, who deserved good things, maybe even a crown. But something had happened to it—some tragedy that sent it spiraling from the sky into the tangled branches of the maples on the hill. It may sound strange, but it felt symbolic of all that was wrong in the world. All the pain and suffering. All the good things that get tangled up and dried out and faded. 

As I looked at the bird’s wings spread out in tragic glory, I thought of Jesus, His arms spread out on the cross. The perfect man who was also God—the one who deserved a crown and every other good thing, but instead He was trapped on a tree. A spectacle. Irreverent, hanging there in His suffering while other people went about their daily lives. It wasn’t right. More than that, it was the most wrong it could possibly be. 

I wasn’t home the day the men came in their bucket truck to remove the precious bird in the branches. My husband was there though and he told me that the men were somber as they removed it. They treated it with great respect and even sorrow. They kept saying, “what a shame.” 

Sometimes I cannot escape the glaring evidence of wrongness in the world, in humanity, in myself. It grates against the thought of what should be. It makes me want to hide my face but I feel its shadow over me even when I look away.  

When Jesus died it looked like the end of a story. But it was the beginning of a new story—one where death would not have the final word. The wrongness was real. It was deep. But God’s goodness was deeper still, and more powerful. Death did not win. Because He died, we are being made new.

Someday, I will paint my beautiful Great Blue Heron as he should have been. He will wear a crown and represent death turned backward.