Encouragement

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Holy Trumpeters

The road was covered with a thick sheet of gray-white ice. I shuffled along, my legs tense and my steps tentative, to keep from falling. Shallow breaths of icy air drew the coldness deep inside. The only sound was that of my feet crunching the ice…”ca-runch, runch, runch.”

After walking almost a mile however, I noticed a different noise in the distance and stopped momentarily to listen.

It sounded something like a cheering crowd – the faint rumblings of a mob of spectators responding to competition. The crowd’s background roar was punctuated with various cries that overshadowed the rest – bursts of “whee” and “hey” and “oooooh.”

There was no gathering of people on this lonely road beside the lake in December. There was no stadium nearby, and definitely no football game. There were no loudspeakers, either. I was absolutely sure I was alone. And yet the noise continued to escalate in volume and intensity as I turned a bend in the road following lake’s shoreline.

Around the curve, bobbing like corks on the choppy surface of the frigid lake, was a flock of trumpeter swans. Evidently they had stopped for a rest during their migratory trip south. They each faced the same direction, into the wind – probably a hundred of them in all – and proceeded to dialogue with each other with voices that now seemed both melodic and compelling.

I watched for only a few minutes before there was a great pounding and flailing of giant wings and the entire flock took to the air. The huge birds flopped along at first, running on the surface of the water, and then lifted up to soar away...chattering all the while with their trumpet-voices.

And then they were gone.

I stood there on the ice-covered road, marveling at the sight, still breathing my shallow breaths, while the wind seared my face with its sharp knives. It was a magnificent moment; one when I became a part of something much more grand, something that mirrored the holiness of God.

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