Birds on a shovel

I ought to keep a list of pastoral duties which are not taught in seminary but part of pastoral life. It sounds cliché, but it probably is something I ought to do.
As I sat in my office today pondering some important exegetical point, off in my own world, there was a knock at the door from the manager of the nursery school in our building, alerting me that there was a dead bird outside. Apparently, the little bird had flown straight into the clear glass front door of our church and laid quite dead on the ground nearby. “Since you are the leader of the church,” she gently joked, “we nursery school teachers elected you to take care of it.”
And so I did. I grabbed the nearest shovel and scooped the bird up and began to walk toward the ditch at the back of the property. On my way, though, something gray and vaguely phosphorescent caught my eye, and there was another dead bird, this one bigger, I guess a turtledove. I picked the second bird up, loaded him on the shovel, and off the three of us went for what was not the most graceful funeral I have ever done. Holding the birds out to my side as far as I could, careful not to make eye contact (not that the birds would have looked back), we soon arrived at the ditch, and I hurled the two birds, one little and one big, half-way out.
Th-thud.
Those were two ugly thuds. Two birds that days before would have skittishly flown away if someone had so much as approached them, now were thrown and just smacked the ground with a thud.
It struck me that one day, I too will make a thud if someone should throw me into a ditch. Not that I hope someone treats my body that way, but I suppose I won’t know the difference anyway.
Death is a mysterious thing; and it takes much faith to hear a thud and to still believe there is more than we can see, more life than we can know here.