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Parable of the Day: Why the Swallows Migrate in Winter


An old legend has it that long ago, there was a time when swallows didn’t migrate during the cold season. Every year, they had to endure harsh frost and snow. Many birds died every winter. A kind-hearted man wanted to help them somehow. He started doing everything he could to teach them. He pointed at the south but the swallows didn’t understand him; he offered them food but they didn’t follow him; he scared them off in the right direction but all his efforts were in vain. So he asked God to turn him into a swallow. God granted his wish and turned the man into a swallow that could think and feel like a human being. The Swallowman easily explained his point to the other swallows and they followed him in the fall.

That was how the swallows started to migrate in winters. Of course, it’s merely a poetic legend. Hopefully, it will help us to understand — at least to some extent — how the eternal Wisdom born of eternal Love turned into a human being among human beings in order to lead those who shiver from the bitterness of the earth into the warm lands, into the Kingdom of God, where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. Even as a fragile human, the great Lord remained the One, Unchangeable, and Eternal — He always remained the same God that He had been since the beginning, in his boundless Kingdom and his unspeakable glory.

By St. Nikolaj of Serbia, Missionary Letters
Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

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