I've always felt that birthday presents are always better when they are late. You can count on most of the populace to deliver presents punctually which allows me to give my presents a couple weeks or a couple months later. A late birthday present says, "Everyone else in your life gave you a present on your birthday because they were culturally obligated to, but I waited to give you the best present on the day you absolutely needed to know that someone loves you and was thinking about you." I think God agrees with me. Let me explain with an experience that just happened:
My missionary companion and I were sitting in the church building today when suddenly she pointed out the window.
"LOOK!"
We watched two quail and 10 teeny tiny quail babies run by. My first instinct when things are small and adorable is to get closer and make weird squealing sounds. We watched them from the inside for a few minutes, but I was not close enough to really see how cute the barely 2 inches tall birds were so I opened the door.
This was a mistake.
The parents ran for it and the babies hid themselves in the shrubbery. My heart sank. I had separated these poor, tiny baby birds from their parents! Probably, this morning when the two quail were discussing their day they mentioned their hope that no huge two-legged featherless monsters would try to see how adorable their children were!
Note: I am not a bird whisperer.
No matter how much I begged and pleaded with the baby birds hiding in the flower bushes to run across the parking lot to their parents, they wouldn't budge. We tried chasing them and coaxing them. We promised their parents were really close they just had to come out of the bush to see how close they were.
The mother started coming over to us, so we hid behind pillars to watch the drama. The mom squawked and called to her babies, but they remained hidden. We walked into the building feeling like the worst human beings on the planet. A few minutes later, we watched all the babies come out of the bush and follow their parents. Because I'm a slow learner, I ran outside to see them closer and they all took off running around a corner to get away from me.
I've been sitting here trying to come up with a gospel principle I learned from this experience, and I've been drawing blanks. God could have been teaching me about listening to His voice or avoiding temptations or running away from spiritual danger or the responsibility of parents to their children or any number of things.
Or maybe He just remembered that I'd never seen a baby quail up close before, and He knew I'd think they were really adorable so He sent a whole family of them my way. He was right. Those babies were some of the most adorable things I've ever seen! That's called a tender mercy, but you could call it a really late birthday present from the Best Dad in the World. This one plus all the other tender experiences throughout my life have taught me that God is real, and He is our very loving Father in Heaven.
Psalms 145:9 "The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works."
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| Not my quail...lds.org |
What's a tender mercy you've seen in your life recently?
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