Sparrows and the word for Monday

What a beautiful cooler day today-skies are a little overcast and it's in the 70's. A great day for yard work-and to have the windows open in the house. I trimmed up the forsythia in the front, and plan to do a few more chores outside before it gets dark.

I set up the bird and squirrel feeders several days ago and there's a lot of activity out there-I think a lot of sparrows, but also I've seen blue jays and I think I saw a finch or two. What is it about sparrows that they are considered sort of a nuisance bird? My dad in his later years made it his personal mission to rid his property of sparrows as much as possible by setting up traps for them. I looked on Wikipedia at several articles on sparrows, and one article says that house sparrows are the most widely distributed wild bird on the planet. It also says that house sparrows are aggressive in forcibly usurping the nesting sites of other birds, and in fact, sometimes even build a new nest right on top of an existing nest with babies in it. Did you know that the house sparrow has the shortest incubation period of all birds-10-12 days- and that a female can lay 25 eggs in one summer? They also don't have a very exciting "call" - the article calls it a "short and incessant chirp". So what we have is a bird which is very prolific, which has an annoying and constant chirp, and sometimes is destructive to other species of birds, taking over nests and housing boxes.

Yet, I think the sparrow is the only bird that I can find that Jesus directly mentions in the New Testament - other than maybe a dove? Perhaps you scholars reading this can help me out there. Nevertheless, Jesus says even though sparrows were sold 2 for a penny or 5 for a penny, depending on which book you reference (Matthew 10:29 and Luke 12:6 NIV), not one of them falls to ground without God knowing about it, or, as Luke says, God forgetting about about them. The point is, if God knows that about such a common bird as a sparrow, what does He know about me? What does He care about me? Jesus goes on to state that we are worth more than many sparrows to God. I don't know about you, but this gives me great comfort.

In honor of my spouse, the word for the day is: DEMOPHOBE n. This is not a fear of Democrats but, it is a morbid dread of crowds and massed humanity, i.e., the 5-10 people that might be waiting in a restaurant lobby, or, the 30 people gathered in a church fellowship hall, or, heaven forbid, the crowd of several thousand at a concert or other community function. The author of book I have referenced previously states rather cleverly that this is one of the more common phobias, and if all the sufferers of this malady were put together in one place, they wouldn't like it one bit.