Yesterday morning I woke up with this phrase ringing in my ears, “His eye is on the sparrow.” I knew it was the lyric of a song, but I didn’t know the song (nor that it was part of Sister Act 2!) or any of the other lyrics and I certainly didn’t know why I woke up with these words in my mind. They were so clear as if someone had spoken them out loud.
We had a slow morning yesterday and so as the boys were happily playing I decided to take the opportunity to mull this phrase over a bit more by doodling it (and by playing multiple versions of it on YouTube). 
As I got up off the floor after the boys had finished playing and I had finished my doodle I glanced out the window and was taken aback to see a small sparrow hopping around in our little, rain drenched back garden (I was so taken aback I didn’t even manage to get a photo). As I watching the little bird hopping about it felt as if the Lord was saying, “my eye is on the sparrow.”
As I wrote about a few posts back, we have gone through rather a lot of change lately. In addition to the major recent upheaval we know that there is more change and another move to come in the next few months. But despite knowing this we don’t know what this move will look like, when it will happen or where we are going.
Before our move two months ago I had been quite happy to live with all the uncertainty over our future but as the weeks have passed and there doesn’t seem to be any more certainty emerging I begun to start to allow myself to become unsettled and found myself having more and more niggling ‘what if?’ thoughts – what if this next step doesn’t happen in the way we had hoped? What if Joel ends up staying in his current job for an extra year? What if… A million different ‘what ifs’.
I looked up the scripture that the song is based on (it’s found in Matthew 6) and I was so struck by it. It’s about not worrying:
Stop being worried or anxious about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, as to what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father keeps feeding them. Are you not worth much more than they?
I was reminded that I don’t need to be afraid. I don’t need to know the next ten steps ahead and I don’t need to make a million plans of my own. Rather I simply need to be faithful in my here and now, in my every day. I need to take each step of this adventure trusting that the one whose eye is on the sparrow is on me too. What a gift!
I thought you might enjoy a bit of Sister Act 2 so here’s a link to the clip from the film where Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount sing this song. I hope you know the truth of this song for yourself too today.
HOPE OVERFLOWING 