The Wasted Nest

by Donna Poole

I couldn’t stop watching. The tiny window at the top of the stairs was the perfect spot to see Mama Robin begin building her nest on the windowsill. I wondered if this was her first nest; I doubted it, because that same windowsill had been home to previous nests.

How old was she? I had no idea, but I knew some robins live twelve years and build twenty or thirty nests.

Mama Robin worked almost a week on her nest, diligently gathering grass and twigs, intricately weaving them, and gluing them to each other and the windowsill with beakfuls of mud. She made hundreds, thousands of trips. I loved seeing her fly into the nest, flap her wings, and wiggle around to shape a perfect cradle for her babies. The nest grew large enough to hold a baseball. When it was almost finished, she lined it with soft grass. Research told me her completed nest weighed 7.23 ounces, almost half a pound.

I hoped, over the next five weeks, to see her lay her eggs and watch the baby robins grow. I knew it was unlikely I’d be there to observe their solo flight, but maybe it would happen.

Mama Robin didn’t lay her eggs right away, but one day a pale blue egg appeared, and a few days later another. Finally, she had four beautiful eggs and began sitting on her nest. She only left for short times. One day I noticed an egg was missing. I checked the ground for fragments of blue shell to see if the egg had fallen but found nothing. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one watching the eggs. Squirrels, blue jays, and crows all steal and eat eggs. Snakes will swallow the eggs whole, and coons love robin eggs as a tasty treat. I never saw the thief, but one by one, all the eggs disappeared

Then Mama Robin broke my heart. Instead of flying away she sat on a nearby tree branch hours at a time and stared at her empty nest. She did this for days. Is she an old robin? Is this her last chance to lay eggs and raise babies? Is that why she’s staying here so long? I knew she was mourning. Robins don’t cry, but my eyes were wet enough for both of us.

Finally, Mama Robin left, but through summer storms, fall winds, and winter snows, the nest has stayed. She built it well. I see it every time I go up or downstairs, and it makes me wonder about wasted things.

Elisabeth Elliot wrote of wasted things. When she was a young, single missionary, she lived with the Colorado Indians in San Miguel, Ecuador. They had no written language, and Elisabeth determined to learn their language and write it so they could have the Bible in their own language. She worked for almost a year, tediously reducing sounds to an alphabet. At the end of nine months she packed the only copy of all her handwritten work into a suitcase and gave it to another missionary so translation could begin. Someone stole the suitcase from that missionary.

At first Elisabeth expected a miracle. How would the suitcase be found? In what way would God have it suddenly reappear? It never did. It was a hard lesson of loss, nine months of difficult labor gone in an instant.

Was Elisabeth’s work wasted? The loss taught her to trust God with the inexplicable. The hard work sharpened her mind, and if you, like me, are a fan of her writing, you appreciate that deeply spiritual and awesomely creative mind. That early loss also made Elisabeth stronger to face deeper losses to come. So, no, it wasn’t wasted.  

Elisabeth lost her first husband, Jim Elliot, to the spears of the Auca Indians in Ecuador, and her second husband, Addison Leithch, to an agonizing cancer. When she was seventy-eight, Elisabeth began a ten-year battle against dementia. She lost her beautiful mind to that disease.

What a waste! That might be our first response.

When Elisabeth found out she had dementia she determined to accept it from God’s hand and for His glory just as she had everything else in her life. And now, as my own memory begins a downward slide, she is my teacher. How can such beautiful teaching be a waste?

Throughout our forty-five year ministry at our country church I’ve often thought of Elisabeth Elliot’s suitcase when people we’ve loved and poured our lives into have turned from us, or worse, from God, when misunderstandings happened and people refused reconciliation, when years of labor seemed to produce so few results.

Is our poured-out love wasted? My mind might cry “wasted” in its gloomy moments, but my heart knows better.

Even through tears my heart sings. Why? Because, in God’s economy, He wastes nothing. Love is never wasted.

Mama Robin, if you’re still alive, if you fly back to Michigan for another spring and see your empty nest, don’t feel like it was wasted. I wish you’d been able to have four beautiful babies, but maybe that will happen this summer. You built well, and you loved well, and love always means something.