The thumping against the garage window sounded too vigorous for a moth. I looked up and realized it was a hummingbird caught in a web. Too high to reach, I grabbed my son’s lacrosse stick and carefully pulled the bird down. Her wings were stuck in the sticky tendrils, so I gently pulled them off, marveling at her iridescent chest feathers and the thrill of being so close to a hummingbird. I had almost finished when her tiny black eyes – as small as a pinhead – seemed to look right at me. It was as if she were trying to communicate something to me. Like the look of sympathy in your pet’s eyes – a look of understanding that spans species. Then, flash! She took flight.
Scripture says, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” (Romans 8:19, ESV) Was she looking at me, longing for a day when spiders don’t need to build webs and birds don’t die? Was she longing for the sticky threads of this fallen world to be removed?
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As a child, I was fascinated by orchestras tuning up before a performance. A friendly, discordant miasma of sounds welled up from the different instruments. You could pick up a flutter of a tune from the flute section, or a few soft bellows from the tuning of the tympani and get a fleeting preview of the piece you were about to hear when the conductor wove it all together. Are we living in the tune up? Is this life just a preview of the harmony that will be when the sons of God are revealed? This life is full of the cacophony of human struggle – the sticky threads of mankind’s repeated failures. But one day there will no longer be the frustration of beating against the glass, but the sons of God will be set free.
All creation is looking at the Conductor’s baton and waiting for the downbeat. The start of the heavenly music of the cosmos. If the gem-like beauty of that hummingbird is only the orchestra tuning up, I long to hear the harmony of the new heavens and the new earth.