A little visitor

Today I saw a bird in the brush that was rather plain looking but had a beautiful song. I watched him perched on a branch, his throat rolling up and down as he sang his heart out. I tried to memorize his coloring and his beak shape, although as I said he was pretty plain. Once inside, I became a little frustrated, because all my bird books wanted me to believe it was a bushtit,

 

photos via Cornell Lab of Ornithology

and I thought it looked like one too but when I researched it online, the bushtit didn't have the same lovely song I had heard.

A little more digging revealed the wrentit, which is much more rare, but has the lovely song. If you visit this page and scroll down, you can click and listen to the second of three songs listed. That's the one.

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This little bird brought a big thought to me today. How sad it must be, I thought, to have no distinguishing features. In fact, if it wasn't for his song, I would've marked him off as a bushtit and called it a day. But he would've been quite misunderstood.

Sometimes I can feel like my life is pretty non-descript, or even that I might honestly be labelled as plain. I'm a pretty simple person and I don't have the exciting lifestyle that so many of us dream about. But I also believe that each person was made uniquely by God for just such a time and place as they are in now, that each person has a destiny. And our destiny is to, in our various ways, sing our heart's song to the world. What a lovely thing it would be to stop our work every once in awhile, lift our eyes from the task at hand and just listen to someone else's song - their life story, their passions, what makes them unique. I think we will find that no one can ever truly be described as plain. We each have a part to play in a Great Symphony.