My brother brought us the baby mockingbird, asking our ten-year-old son John to take care of him. “He needs to be fed every couple of hours like this.” My brother pulled a cricket from a small wire container and squeezed the cricket’s face before feeding it to the bird. “You have to pinch his head to stun him so he can eat it,” my brother explained, getting ready to stuff the bug down the bird’s throat.

Eager to help, John put his fingers to the baby bird’s head.

“What are you doing?” My brother asked.

“I’m stunning him,” John said.

“Not the bird! The cricket! Where’s your common sense, John?” my brother cried.

We all laughed and my brother went on to teach John how to feed the baby mockingbird. Six hours later, the baby bird was dead and John was crying with me at the kitchen table. “Why did he die?” John asked with tears running down his freckled face, his grimy little boy hand pushing around my leather journal lying between us on the table. I had my Bible and journal out trying to hear God that night. The baby mockingbird’s death upset me, too. It had already been a sad week with the passing of one of my son-in-law’s friends, Mark, a young pastor and the loving father of three children, who’d fought a short, hard battle with cancer. Mark had been diagnosed with esophagus cancer around the same time I got my melanoma diagnosis back in December. While doctors cut the cancer out of my leg and proclaimed me cured, Mark’s cancer was found to be inoperable. We prayed for a miracle of healing for Mark, but that didn’t come. Instead, a bittersweet funeral came where Mark’s friends heard the gospel. “Mark wanted me to tell all of you he didn’t go to heaven because he was a good man. Or a good father. Or because he led a good life. He went to heaven because Jesus died for his sins,” the pastor said at Mark’s funeral.

As John sat there weeping at the table over the baby mockingbird, my eyes settled on my journal under John’s hand. “Be still and know that I am God,” Psalm 46:10, was stamped on the front leather of the little book. Sitting there with my grieving son, I told John I didn’t know why the baby mockingbird died. At the same time, I was thinking, and I don’t know why Mark had to die, but I know this: I know God. This God who tells me to be still and know him, I know him, and this gives me peace and hope even in grief, even when we’ve killed my brother’s baby mockingbird, which I find ironic considering I’m reading the novel: To Kill A Mockingbird right now.

Do you know mockingbirds mimic other birds? They also imitate animals and mechanical sounds such as car alarms. I like mockingbirds, but they can be loud and silly. Especially when they sing at night when you’re trying to sleep.

People are a lot like Mockingbirds. Often they say and do what other people say and do without knowing the real truth. Statements like, “He died because God needed another angel in heaven.” Nonsense. People do not become angels when they die. God made angels angels and people people and they do not morph into each other with death. Angels and humans are separate beings even in heaven.  And here is my personal favorite untrue statement spoken all the time: “God helps those who help themselves.” Do you know this saying isn’t even in the Bible? This statement is actually attributed to Ben Franklin quoted in Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1757. Its thought to have originated from Algernon Sydney in 1698 in an article titled: Discourses Concerning Government. The Bible declares the opposite, “God helps the helpless,” Isaiah 25:4. And Romans 5:6 tells us, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”

Humans are helpless mockingbirds, but we don’t like to hear this. We are vulnerable to all kinds of things outside of our control, cancer and car wrecks and ruthless cowards with guns in schools and shopping malls. Above all, we are helpless when it comes to sin and death until Jesus saves us from it. Salvation is a gift, but it was bought with Christ’s blood and suffering on the cross. “Even though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience from the things he suffered” Hebrews 5:8. And we learn this same way, by suffering and watching other people suffer. Especially admirable people like Jesus and a man like Mark and Number 42 Jackie Robinson. 

Mark loved baseball. He and my son-in-law Drew met at a baseball store where they worked together. With Mark’s death and the novel To Kill A Mockingbird fresh in my mind, I watched the movie 42 about the first African-American player to break the baseball color barrier. In the film, team executive Branch Rickey played by Harrison Ford, tells Jackie Robinson, a fiercely courageous Methodist man, where the word sympathy originated. From the Greek word to suffer with someone. As people saw Robinson suffer in baseball they began to sympathize with him. His white teammates were kicked out of hotels and received hate mail along with Robinson. Baseball fans began to share the pain Robinson felt every day as he was mocked and spit upon by hate-filled racists. I love how Robinson says in the movie, “God built me to last.” To outlast racism in baseball. And he did.

In the book, To Kill A Mockingbird, an innocent man, Tom Robinson, is put to death. His lawyer, Atticus Finch, suffers for trying to defend this African-American man. Harper Lee who wrote the story said, the book was “Christian in its ethic” representing a code of honor and conduct. No other novel, besides Uncle Tom’s Cabin (also written by a woman with Christian ethics), has done more to change America than To Kill A Mockingbird.

When admirable men suffer and die, people~ even mockingbird people~ take notice.