Look up, Gulls!

Tonight I watched the sun melt into the ocean and a flock of gulls silhouettes fade to black across the sky.

For a few moments, everything seemed to slow down.

The waves continued their steady rhythm.

The breeze was soft and barely moving. The gulls soared effortlessly above it all allowing the wind to carry them. No fight, just surrender.

Just trust.

They weren’t fighting the changing sky or resisting the current. They were simply trusting the air beneath their wings.

In that second, it struck me how life parallels and how we struggle to label it all right.

We hold tightly to our plans. We worry about tomorrow. We exhaust ourselves trying to control outcomes that were never ours to control. Yet God whispers to us through his creation what he’s been showing us all along : trust me.

These birds, these gulls remind us that faith is not about knowing exactly where we’re going. Sometimes it’s about the one holding the wind.

It’s about keeping steady.

Nature speaks if we’re willing to listen.

For sure there is more to a sunset than what our eyes can consume and much more than our brain can interpret.

The ocean teaches us lessons everyday. It knows when to retreat and when to return. It evens knows how far to come. The tide rises and falls. Storms come and eventually go.

And through all this the gulls still soar! They just obey their call.

When the sand beneath our feet starts to shift and the path becomes foggy and unclear, perhaps we don’t need all the answers at once. Perhaps, we simply need more faith to spread our wings and trust God for the right current to move us along for the next stretch of our journey.

Maybe we look harder and look up!

As the light faded to dark and the gulls disappeared into the distance I stood there a little longer, grateful for another sea-note, not delivered from a pulpit, but from above the sky’s walls and beyond its borders. Deeper and wider than the sea.

Look up, Gulls! My faithful friends.

Sometimes the most profound messages arrive on wings.

a beachy point of view