The Bee Gees had it right

“How deep is your love?” the Bee Gees

The oddest duo of things happened late Easter afternoon. First, I was innocently sitting on the deck with my husband, reading a back issue of Outside magazine and enjoying the sun, when two sentences almost left me in tears.

The Matt Skenazy piece (September 2017) was a short anniversary-issue tribute to surf great Laird Hamilton. “Raised by a single mother on Oahu’s North Shore, he (Laird) was a toddler when he approached surf legend Bill Hamilton and asked him to be his dad. Bill obliged, marrying Laird’s mom shortly thereafter.”

Now, I’m thinking there’s some back story here, but what? A beach, a toddler, a surf legend and a marriage/adoption? How romantic. How touching. How miraculous.

Then, while I was still blinking furiously, a chickadee positioned himself in the juneberry tree directly in my husband’s line of sight. “Oh, he wants food,” my husband said, popping off his chair to head to the seed bin.

You have to understand that my husband, a birder since his teens, regularly talks to “his” chickadees, the border collies of the songbird world. He “chicka-dee-dee-dees” to them, imitating their call. They “chicka-dee-dee-dee” back, sometimes following us on walks in order to talk to him, or perhaps more accurately, remind him to fill the feeder. In the past, he’s trained such birds to eat from his hand. Miraculous.

It wasn’t until this morning that the two incidents melded together with a Bee Gees tune that simply wouldn’t get out of my head this weekend. “How deep is your love?” one of their most beautiful hits asks. Suddenly I knew what I’d seen on this most glorious day of Christendom — a father’s love. For a toddler on a beach. For the chickadees that have come to take shelter in his garden. And, through the cross and resurrection, a love for each and every one of us that simply will not die.

How deep is His love? Deep enough to be miraculous!