Faith & Spirituality

by Scribe Leaf Library · 2 min read · 1 view

Elias never talked much about his faith. He wasn't the kind of man who quoted verses at you over coffee or wore it like a badge — he just got up every morning before six to feed the animals nobody else wanted, and let the work say whatever needed saying. Behind his house was a lean-to shelter he'd built himself: a three-legged dog named Samuel, two rabbits with clipped ears from a lab that had finished with them, a crow with a wing that never healed quite straight, and whatever else the town brought him — the injured, the abandoned, the ones too old or too broken to be worth anyone's trouble. Elias thought otherwise. He thought every one of them was worth the trouble, precisely because they couldn't repay it. "People ask me why I bother with creatures that can't even thank me," he told the young pastor who visited once, curious about the man everyone in town spoke of so warmly. "But that's the whole point, isn't it? If I only loved what loved me back, or what could do something for me, what kind of love would that even be? I figure God didn't make the sparrow so it could be useful to me. He made it because He wanted to. Loving it the same way, with nothing expected back, feels like the closest I get to understanding Him at all." He fed the crow from his own palm every morning, patient with its wariness, never rushing the trust. He sat with the old dog on bad nights when its joints ached too much for sleep, one hand resting on its side, saying nothing, needing to say nothing. He didn't do it to be seen doing it — there was no one out there most mornings but him and the animals and the grey coming light. That was rather the point. Whatever this was between him and God, it didn't need an audience to be real. When people asked what church he belonged to, he'd shrug and say he supposed his was out back, among the crates and the water bowls, and that he figured showing up faithfully counted for something even without a steeple over it. "Whatever you do," he liked to say, half to himself, echoing something he'd read so long ago he'd stopped remembering where, "do it like it matters to somebody bigger than the person in front of you." Then he'd go back to work, because the rabbits needed feeding and the crow was calling, and there was nothing more to explain that the work itself wasn't already saying.