I keep an unusual photo on my work desk, where I can see it always. It’s a photo of me, just turned fifty, in my jammies and morning-face-blotchiness. I’m looking down and very near, at the little bird perched an inch from my cheek on my shoulder.

As I listened, more and more mesmerized, he told me how Bandit would sit on the floor, right next to his girls as they did their homework, and other such stories. I finally burst out, “Alan! I want to see your bird!” There was a split-second pause and a light of sudden inspiration appeared in his eyes. “Esther! You can have my bird!!” And so I inherited Bandit.

Bandit moved into the empty rabbit’s cage on the floor in the kitchen, a week after Grady’s death. I was enthralled to be the owner of a wild bird, and to be so close to him. Bandit, if he couldn’t be in view of me, and especially my face, was upset. Cedar waxwings, I learned, are group-birds: they do everything with other waxwings—even bathe together. I was Bandit’s group.

But it quickly became apparent that something was wrong. He looked dreadful, and he couldn’t fly: his one wing either had no feathers, or he didn’t even have a wing—I didn’t know enough to tell. I hadn’t heard enough of his story to know why he was this way. My enthrallment transitioned, in a week, to sadness: my little bird couldn’t fly like all the other little birds.

I would have to collect Bandit from the cage, to stop his squealing, and perch him on my shoulder, or forearm. Then he would settle down and gaze at my face. If he got nervous and started flutter, he would fall off.

That was when I got the point. I looked down at Bandit, who was gazing up at me, and thought, Oh. I’m that bird. My wing is broken, I cannot fly, I don’t know where I am going. But if I just sit still, I may always gaze at my Father’s face. And that is enough.

Bandit spent the summer on my shoulder or close by. He pecked happily in my face powder when I was putting on makeup; he loved pecking at the cursor on my computer screen. His outside perch was in my potted hibiscus. I scavenged the neighborhood for berries, and made him miniature fruit salads in the morning. I wafted him around on a stick so that he could snap bugs out of the air. When I stooped over to weed, he ran to the high point on my back; when I stood up, he ran back to my shoulder. He would doze with his little chest and bill lightly touching my cheek. But many times he just gazed at my face.

My family thought I was crazy. But I was learning to sense the presence of God in my pain. I was learning to gaze at, and be stilled by, God’s face, as the “one thing” of Psalm 27. Not answers, but presence. Not even healing, but presence. Not direction, nor resolution, but presence…presence near me.

Over the summer, Bandit grew back his wing feathers. At the point of the photo, he looks like a very healthy cedar waxwing, sitting next to my cheek. 48 hours later, after having sat on my shoulder for about 20 minutes as I sat on my deck with a friend, Bandit flew across the few intervening feet of yard to the woods on its verge. I was not expecting it. It took my breath away and flooded me with jostling sorrow and joy. My immediate thought: God! Am I healed too??? Do you really think I am ready to fly?

It would be years before I could fly again, it has seemed. But Bandit, and that summer with Bandit, taught me to seek God’s face and to find it, steady and close by. That face-to-face communion is what I seek to return to in quiet moments of personal worship. Bandit left, but my sense of the presence of God, my knowing to seek him when I am in agony, and my finding his gaze in any moment I sit still, has never departed. The photo serves as a constant summons.

The Lord make his face shine upon you…and give you peace.