a modern day St Francis

It's been a pleasure to have Travis from Church of the Apostles, Seattle, with us the last couple of days. I met Travis when we visited COTA after Easter. He's currently spending a month on 'placement' with Moot in London. Anyway, he's one of the most pastoral people I've met. We could do with some people like him in hOME.
Anyway, yesterday morning Travis and I were just chilling out in my front room when we heard our little cat come through the cat flap with a bird in her mouth that was still alive and struggling (and occasionally succeeding temporarily) to get away. We managed to get the cat away from the bird and then Travis got the bird on to our dustpan and he took it out into the garden (I told him to kill it!). I, meanwhile, stayed in the house trying to stop the cat getting back outside through the cat flap.
I eventually found the thing you can slide into the cat-flap to stop the cat getting through it and then I went out to see whether Travis had completed his executioner duties.
He was stood at the end of the garden blessing the bird! I saw him make the sign of the cross. It was a vision of a modern day St Francis!
The bird was injured but not so badly that we felt justified in killing it. But it wasn't flying off and we couldn't leave it in the garden cos the cat would have got it. So I suggested we put it in a box and sent it down the river. We found a little cardboard box, put some grass in the bottom of it, put the bird on top of the grass, and pushed the box out onto the water and watched it drift off downstream.

This morning I suggested to Travis that perhaps someone was sitting by the riverbank yesterday watching the river drift by only to see the bird in the box drifting past them and wondering how on earth the bird had managed to build a boat for itself and launch it.