“…hide me in the shadow of your wing…from my deadly enemies who surround me” (Psalm 17:8,9).
Ivan Turgenev has written an incident in which responsible, righteous, fierce anger was demonstrated in the context of a sparrow’s love and compassion for its offspring. He says…
I was returning from walking along an avenue of a large garden, my dog running in front of me. Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to slither along as though tracking game. I looked along the avenue and saw a wounded young sparrow on the ground, weakly and painfully flapping its half-grown wings. It had fallen out of the nest and was unable to move out of harms way. My dog was slowly approaching it when, suddenly, darting down from a tree close by, an old dark-throated sparrow came winging in like a shot, furiously flapping its wings. It stopped right in front of the dog’s nose. Ferociously and angrily, it then flung itself twice toward the open jaws of…
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