Greetings from Montreat Youth Conference! I am here with a fantastic group of youth and adults from the Northern Alabama Presbytery. We are a couple of days in and I am enjoying my first experience here!

So, I spent a few days last week at my parents’ for July 4^th. While there we had a bird nest by the door to the house. There has been a nest there for years and many times I have seen the bird flying out as we approached, but until this year I had never thought about the fact that if a bird lived in it that there would probably be baby birds! This year we looked and at first we couldn’t see them, but one blinked! Yep, four baby birds! After knowing that they were there, I heard their quiet peeping voices each morning.

This week at Montreat we have spent quite a bit of time talking about what voices we are hearing and not hearing. Who gets a voice and who is silenced. As I thought about the baby birds they only spoke when I wasn’t around. As soon as they heard me they stopped chirping out of fear. It made me reflect who doesn’t speak around me due to fear? Who else doesn’t have a voice in our culture due to fear? Who do we want to keep quiet due to fear?

If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered. Proverbs 21:13 (NIV)

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’  Matthew 25:35-36 (NIV)

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