Ravens over the laurel
What the opening scene of Poacher’s Moon taught me about paying attention.
“Consider the ravens…” — Luke 12:24
Poacher’s Moon opens with four ravens.
Wade Holloway knows what they mean before he’s halfway down the bank. Ravens come early to a kill. Buzzards wait for the sun. So when he sees ravens working the laurel at ten minutes to seven on a frosty November morning, he knows something has been dead only a few hours, and he knows where to look.
That’s Wade at his best. He reads everything: the wind coming up the hollow, a scrape in the leaves, a single brass casing the shooter missed in the dark. The man who trained him beat one rule into him. You don’t know a thing until you’ve checked it.
And yet the man who notices every sign in the woods has stopped noticing the one that matters most. He isn’t sure anymore what he believes, and he hasn’t told his wife.
Jesus said, “Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?” (Luke 12:24, KJV).
Consider is an attention word. It means stop. Look. Think it through.
Most of us are good at paying attention to what can hurt us. We read the room, the bank balance, the tone of an email. We’re a lot less careful about what God has been putting in front of us, sometimes for years: the same verse showing up three times in a week, the friend who keeps asking, the knock we keep telling ourselves is the wind.
This week, consider the ravens. Then consider what you’ve been walking past.