identity crisis.

There are days when, from almost any place in the house, you can hear Lalo screaming.



For those who are wondering, Lalo is not a baby, or an angry teenager, or even a person at all. He is my cockatiel, which, for those who are still wondering, is a bird.

Today, he is loud.

A lot of people (including myself, pre-cockatiel) make the unfortunate mistake of believing that all tame birds are magical singing creatures that exist solely to make your life brighter. But, like any new addition to your life, the brightness is bittersweet. Lalo does sing, and he makes these endearing smooching noises when I give him kisses, and overall he is extraordinarily personable. But. He does know how to scream.

Lalo spends entire days listening anxiously to the birdsong outside my window and replying with just one single note, at varying always-loud-sometimes-louder volumes, trying to get the attention of the birds on the other side of the glass. He climbs every wall in his cage and cranes his entire being in the direction of the other birds' voices, but all that he can do in the end is just yell, and yell, and yell.

Naturally, this breaks my heart.


Lalo's scream, the sound itself, is completely repelling. He tweets at the top of his little bird lungs, and all I want to do is strangle him. Generally, I'll just get far enough away to avert the storm until he finishes his soliloquy. But when I stop to remember the heart and reason behind the noise, I melt a little more every time.

There is just something so inherently wrong with a bird being on the wrong side of the glass. And yeah, I know the whole spiel about tame birds versus wild ones, and how Lalo would never survive, and how he really believes he belongs with people and not birds. Don't worry. I'm not going to cast him out into the wild to live his dreams; I know he wouldn't stand a chance. But no matter how many times Lalo acts like he knows how to be a human, it is when he screams that you can tell: he has not forgotten himself completely.

So, the question becomes, how much of myself have I forgotten lately?

Lalo has wings. He is obviously not meant to be on my side of the window pane. I get the idea that maybe he knows this when I try to clip his wings. He is generally the sweetest bird I've ever met, but when he sees scissors he'll do anything to be free of my hands. Biting, screeching, clawing; Lalo would break his own wing to keep from losing his flight feathers. Am I fighting that hard to remember who I am?

It's like this:

C.S. Lewis said that "You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

I have a soul. A soul is like wings for the human frame. When the earth is shaken, my soul will still be here because I am made in the image of the Creator: I am eternal. But how deeply do I believe that? How often do I live as if my body were the end of me? How often am I content with the wrong side of the window pane?

So, while it breaks my heart to hear Lalo screaming, knowing that I cannot set him free, I think it must break God's heart to see us pre-occupied with life in the cage. And although I'd give a lot just for my bird to learn to be quiet, I think that maybe God is most pleased when we are kicking and screaming to be free of the things that hold our souls captive.

Bottom line-

"All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth."

Hebrews 11:13

We don't belong here.
Maybe we're just here to learn some things; to love and to illuminate the way to our Lord as often and as joyfully as possible.


I think I sometimes forget that I'm gonna last forever. I forget that nothing satisfies me except for the love of God, and I forget why that is. Learning identity is hard. I think it sometimes feels like being all by yourself on the wrong side of the window, screaming.

And sometimes it feels like being on the right side, screaming to the world through the glass.


Anyway.

Today is a day for turning off my phone and turning on the internal radio station that actually listens to what peace and quiet sounds like. I think I fight twice as hard than I really have to when I don't give myself time to power down. Today is a day to find the little lost parts of Annie that got left behind on the battle field. Usually, if I sit and wait, they'll all come wandering back to me. Sometimes it takes a couple of conversations, but eventually I'll be all in one piece.

(: thanks for reading.

peace.