Little Red Bird connection

There are some beautiful connections I have made through my Little Red Bird FB page and am so honored to share this heartfelt Little Red Bird story from my new friend Tova:

I have my own little red bird story. I had just been through another one of those horrible, mind-twisting, degrading episodes of screaming conflict with someone who was treating me in a mentally abusive manner. Without going into any more detail, suffice it to say that the outcome of the ordeal was that I felt I could not stay another moment in my own home, grabbed my coat and ran outside into the cold white Canadian winter. Where was I to go? I was newly back in the country, did not drive, and... had NOWHERE to go. So I went and sat in the car - thank G-d it was open.

I sat and cried & cried and tried to calm down, waves of anger and frustration and hopelessness coursing through me until I was finally tired out. After the storm came the quiet stillness of depleted calm. I sat and breathed, and sat and breathed. I knew I would have to go back in soon, where I was needed, but not yet. I was not ready yet. So I just stared out the window in what might have been an open-mouthed, unfocused kind of way, more aware of the tears wet on my face and lashes than of anything else around me. And then the anomaly. Something so odd, it took a few moments for my mind to understand what I was seeing. My surroundings outside the car were for the most part a red-brick little house, brown tree beside the car, and snow covered yard with a large bush up ahead of me. There, amidst the frosted white branches, deep inside the bush was something strikingly - red. RED! Red! Red didn't belong there. In the middle of a bush out in our yard in the middle of Canadian winter. And I came to realise that it was a bird! I think I must have held my breath after first gasping in awe. It just couldn't be!

I'd never seen a red bird before, much less in the middle of winter, perched straight ahead - as though it had been waiting there for me all along, waiting for me to find it. And it had been... all that time. This was one of those moments where the shock of improbability leads to a slow perception of secondary, though more probable meaning.

This was my red bird. G-d sent me this bird, I was sure of it. He had sent me a sign, to jolt me out of my world and into His. It was flagrant, crimson, an attention flag to lead me back to faith in Divine Providence and the knowledge that I was not alone in a barren landscape. G-d was with me, waiting to comfort me in my pain. And comfort it was. I sat, stared, indulged and delighted in this... this Cardinal! It must have been a Cardinal, a male I was to learn later on. It was MY bird, more than it was anyone's on the planet, and it was NOT flying away. I was getting cold. Not even when I got up to return to the house, having returned to myself, did it fly away. It wasn't going to leave me and I took further comfort because of it. I had gained strength now, in this little secret I shared with G-d... I was able to go on.

In the coming weeks and months I continued to see this bird, and was no less amazed each time I spotted it, or when my children told me that it had a mate - a dun coloured female - and a nest in our tree, that they tended together. Somewhere in nature, things were proceeding as they should.

My little red bird came to reassure me... all things were well with the World.