Birds of Prey

Registration for our religious education program went very well this year and no one tore a strip off me for our program's structure. It was a nice change of pace from last year.

Before heading over to the house for a 20-minute email/voicemail/sandwich/check on the Altar Servers break, I closed and locked the doors. After I inhaled my sandwich, I grabbed my keys and headed back to the hall to begin setting up for our Family Day celebrations.

I opened the kitchen door and stood shocked at what I saw. A sparrow was sitting on the kitchen counter. "How did you get in here?" I said to it. Another bird I hadn't noticed was sitting on top of the door and flew down towards me before it hit the window. Two sparrows in the kitchen! "What are you doing here?" I said to them again, trying to shoo them out the wide-open kitchen door to no avail and still puzzling over where they had come from.

Without thinking too much more of it, I walked into the room where we had just had registration and couldn't decide whether to laugh or to cry. There were ten more sparrows flying around and sitting on various "perches" around the entire room. Suddenly I realized how they got in -- without my knowledge, Father had opened the windows wide and in they flew. Apparently they had no trouble getting in, but the angle of the windows made it next to impossible for them to get out.

I was so shocked, I closed the doors, went right back into the house and fortunately found Father in his office. I said, "Brace yourself. This is a weird one," before I announced, "The hall is full of birds."

He didn't say anything and followed me over, grabbing a piece of bread to try to entice the birds to leave. We managed to get the two out of the kitchen fairly easily, and within a few minutes, by using some pretty funny "coo" and "shoo" type of noises, the bread, and herding birds around with an empty box, he had the big room cleared of sparrows. I soon discovered one more had flown upstairs and he spent a good 15 minutes getting that one down and out the door after it repeatedly flew into the big windows. In the meantime, I donned some gloves and spent half of my Family Day set-up time cleaning up bird poop from all of the tables and the floor, and once we were rid of the last bird, Father offered to mop all of the floors to get any little poos I had missed.

Add that to the list of one more ministry situation they didn't warn me about in my MDiv.

I doubled over with laughter when, mop in hand and birds all gone, Father said with a completely straight face, "So, I guess we shouldn't leave the windows open anymore?"