The desperate clawing and scratching in the gutter downspout was certainly alarming and had me convinced that something was in there and it probably couldn’t get out on its own. I was on a Zoom call with a client when my daughter interrupted and expressed that she needed me to come and see the squirrel in the water thing. “The what in the where?” I thought.
Once I’d wrapped up my call, I followed my daughter to investigate her semi-regular animal welfare concerns. Yes, there was definitely something alive and trapped low in the 2-story length aluminum gutter. Fortunately there was a joint with only one screw holding the gutter right in the section where the noise was coming from. I removed the screw and gently pulled off the pipe and then started to cautiously pull leaves out of the downspout.
The furious scratching was intermittent, but each time it resumed, it reminded me that I was getting very close to a small wild thing. I was recalling a childhood memory that I have of my mother trying to coax a squirrel out of our living room with a broom and it darted up the broom stick towards her–squirrel and broom flying off in two different directions at her panic. I pictured a bewildered squirrel dropping out of the gutter and scrambling up my leg in an attempt to get to safety. So I stepped my legs further away from the downspout and leaned over as I continued to pull a small tennis ball and final clods of last season’s leaves out of the pipe. Eventually I’d cleared all the debris and the mystery creature still hadn’t appeared. I shook the pipe a little and a medium sized bird dropped out of the pipe and took flight instantly. It was a dark and glossy starling and she flitted up to a branch and proceeded to shake herself off and preen nervously.
I used to outsource responsibility for the outcomes in my life. If I was unsuccessful at something–a career path, achieving a goal, or a trauma response keeping me in an unconscious holding pattern, I would chock it up to
“well, that must not have been God’s will.”
I was quite sincere in my attempts to surrender to the preordained.
If I’m completely honest though, I was never very fond of God’s will. It seemed arbitrary at best, impenetrable, and downright sinister at times–though I knew it was unholy to admit that… So I didn’t. Admit that. Until just now.
I joined an extremely conservative religion at the tender age of 11, by choice, and to the utter suspicion of my dear mother. There are myriad reasons why I was attracted to this congregation and why I drank all the Kool-Aid that I could mix up, going far deeper than the surface level dogmas of those who’d encouraged my young membership. That may be for another discussion. There were also plentiful benefits of bonding with a small and dedicated religious community–arguably changing the trajectory of my life for the much much better.
20 years into my relentless pursuit of divine wisdom and still desperate for answers, I happened upon YouTube. This was around the time that the all-knowing fount of human wisdom in short video format had just become mainstream. I became a motivational video junkie after getting hooked on just the first one. I don’t remember which video or motivational speaker explained the concept of taking complete responsibility for the outcomes in your life, but I would never see my present circumstances the same way again. Years later I would come to better understand the impact of trauma on human behavior and decisions, but at this early stage in my YouTube therapy and recovery I felt like everything I’d ever known had just been deconstructed. I finally felt I had agency in my life’s outcomes. I no longer had to wonder if every setback was some sign that God was redirecting my path.
Taking responsibility for my life and my circumstances naturally became my M.O. I obsessed to the point of feeling overresponsible–where a person starts to get the grandiose idea that the earth will stop spinning if one quits holding it in place. Somewhere in all that re-scripting of my newfound efficacy I lost sight of the enormous part that Grace plays in our lives.
The starling trapped in the rain gutter got me thinking about myself. The innocent creature made a terribly fatal miscalculation, presumably in search of a good place to build a nest. She poked her little birdie head into a void that she would possibly never be able to exit in her own power. She was helplessly and hopelessly trapped.
Sometimes it’s not about taking personal responsibility for everything that has ever gone wrong in your life. Sometimes it’s about receiving grace.
It’s about the right time, right place Grace.
It’s a little girl painting rocks on the sidewalk outside of her apartment. A little girl who gets curious about a noise and persistently bugs her preoccupied mother to help her figure it out. And a mother who has enough mechanical sense to understand how gutters work and how to quickly and safely dismantle them.
It’s random Grace. Synchronistic Grace.
The bird had clearly messed up. But there was Grace. On the other side of that mistake. Grace with a capital “G.”
And that same Grace has intervened in my life more times than I am even aware of. Can we take a moment and receive continued Grace with a capital “G” for Gratitude?
