The first time I ever heard a woodthrush was late one afternoon when I was ten years old. As children, we just delighted to pick the lovely little wintergreen in the beautiful woods back of our farm and there, in those solitary woods, I heard the liquid tones of a woodthrush. I have never been the same since! That first haunting woodthrush did something to my spirit which I cannot make articulate. It arouses to cons­ciousness some haunting past that I must have had­ a shadow of something most marvelous and wonderful and beautiful that I lost and cannot regain or re­ capture. Now I do not teach transmigration or re­incarnation, but there is a field in there somewhere that was retained and allowed to come to conscious­ness through that very medium—the woodthrush.

God ministers to me through many phenomena. The call of a bird will transport me when nothing else will. I cannot hear a woodthrush even today but it is relating to something in my spiritual welfare. How to explain it, I do not know. It is always in a crisis that God sends this woodthrush to me and it carries with it a terrific challenge, saying: “Come! Do you dare to come and meet God and move on to a new plateau in your spirit? Do you want to come out of and into a fresh new life and light and revelation?”

And so at the close when I have to go—as a little farewell touch with mother nature who has opened her heart to me in so many fields—

I wonder if I might once more hear a woodthrush call from out the woods. In notes so sweet and clear? Of one thing I am very sure—its echo I will hear deep down within my waiting heart, and I shall know no fear.