The Bird That Forgot to Worry

There is a species of sparrow called the white-throated sparrow — small, brown, easily overlooked. Ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice spent seven years in Columbus, Ohio, beginning in 1927, crouched in backyards and along river banks, cataloguing the lives of these birds. She watched them lose nests to storms and begin building again the next morning. No catastrophizing. No paralysis. Just the next necessary thing.

Stress researchers have documented what chronic anxiety does to the human body: elevated cortisol, shortened telomeres, disrupted sleep, accelerated cardiovascular aging. The cruel irony is that worry is the one thing that costs us everything and changes nothing.

Jesus, standing on a Galilean hillside watching swifts wheel overhead, asked a question that cuts through every anxious spiral: "Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?" (Matthew 6:27). He was not dismissing real hardship — unpaid bills, uncertain diagnoses, fractured relationships. He was reorienting the gaze. Not from problems to denial, but from a threatening future to a present, living God who clothes wildflowers in greater glory than Solomon wore in his finest hour.

Anxiety is, at its root, a theology problem. It tells us God has stepped away from the details of our lives. Matthew 6 quietly invites us to look outside the window. The birds are still fed. The flowers are still dressed. And the Father who notices a sparrow's fall has not taken His eyes off you.