Reverend Ann's Letter

August 2026 

During the Covid outbreak, in May 2020, a couple of months into the stay-at-home order, millions of people apparently asked Google, Are birds getting louder?

I’m pretty sure birds were exactly as loud as they’ve always been. It’s just that for the first time in our lives, we weren’t out creating noise pollution, so we actually could hear what had always been there all along. It was good timing too…since hearing birdsong lowers cortisol levels in human beings – who knew?

Anyway, I thought about that whole are birds getting louder thing this week, when I was out in the garden at 7.30 am and from across the road heard the noises of the building site opposite our house.  I could hear the pounding and grinding and it felt intrusive.

However, from the other side of the house, when I really listened,  streamed the delight and surprise of birdsong.

In my right ear, the sounds of human activity, in my left, the morning chimes of my feathered neighbours.

Two different sounds, happening at the same time.  When I focused on the pounding and grinding, which was easy to do because they were so much louder, the birds seemed to just …disappear.

Of course the birds didn’t disappear. I just literally couldn’t hear them when I was tuned into something else.

So it is, with the Word of God’s Kingdom, sown throughout our lives. It is nothing less than a divine counter melody to the chaos of this world.

It’s a song about a God who doesn’t have the decency to be strategic with grace, who has never once in the history of the universe run a cost-benefit analysis on who deserves good news.

This is the truth that is sung by the angels. This word, this logos, is a pounding counter-melody to human ambition and greed and pride, it is a song that eternally says:

Only God is God.

And we are his.

This is the Word of God’s birdsong holding the universe together even when we don’t perceive it, even when we walk through our lives with noise of this world taking up all our hearing.

You don’t have to Google whether God’s grace got quieter. It did not.

The important thing to know is that the Word of God’s kingdom, that deeper truth spoken by the prophets and lived out by Jesus, no matter what season of life you are in, that counter-melody of divine truth surrounds you like birdsong. It always has. It always will. Tilt your head ever so slightly and I think you can hear it.

Go well.

Ann