What Seagulls Do

A few years ago, I was still stinging from the death of my sister (still am actually) and needed to get away from all the chaos in my head. I went to Birch Bay on Bellingham for a few days in February. You can’t get more alone than that. The weather was awful, raining, freezing, and windy. Perfect.



I carried my journal, my pen and my daughter’s camera down to the beach and sat on a log and decided that I was not going to move from that spot until I had heard from God. A word, a touch, anything. I sat for a long time, refusing to give up.



First lesson learned that day: God is more concerned with my character than my comfort. It was really, really cold and many, many times I wanted to say, ‘God can speak to me in my hotel room with the fireplace and jazz on a CD just as easily as out here.’ But I was the one who laid down the gauntlet, and I was going to wait it out.



After a while, I realized that I was spending more time watching the seagulls than listening for God’s voice. I don’t really like seagulls. They’re dirty scavengers, loud, and they create a LOT of waste. They were picking and fighting and screeching at each other and I really wanted them to fly farther down the beach.



Second lesson learned: God speaks to us in the most unlikely places and through the most unlikely things. My best friends husband can find a lesson about God through anything. I remember one Sunday at church when he told a story about these birds and a small island of crabs. The story itself was fascinating to me and then he ended up telling us how he knows that God takes care of us. I was amazed how he had found God in this story. I wanted to be like that, seeing God in all circumstances, in all places, hearing the trees themselves call out His name.



So these seagulls were fighting and scrapping along, picking through the seaweed and the sand, finding clams. Once they found one, they would fly up just high enough and then drop the clam onto rocks and logs. They would break open and the seagull would follow it down and eat the flesh out of the shell and then look for another.



Third lesson learned: God teaches us through painful loss and experience that He will always take care of us.



A young seagull was finding just as many clams as the rest, but in his youthful exuberance, he would fly a lot higher up than the others and then would wait until it hit the ground before going after it. The extra air-time that it took was enough for the other seagulls to swoop in and steal the clam away from him. (I did mention that I don’t like seagulls, right?) After a few trial and errors, he didn’t fly up as high and discovered the perfect height to break open the clams. He also learned to follow the clam down so that when it broke open, he was already there to enjoy his labor. No one was there to hand him clams, it was imperative that he learned how to do this, even if it meant that he had to go hungry for a while.



But the most important lesson learned:



I really miss my sister. My life as I knew it ended when she died. I have told one of my dearest friends that I feel as if my DNA has changed, that’s how different I feel since she’s been gone. I have been a shell of the old me, just making it through each day, wondering when my life will begin again, or if it ever will. I have been lost for so long that I’m not sure if I can be found. All of this had been going through my head for the 2 ½ years between her death and this day at Birch Bay.



One of the seagulls had been digging in the sand in this one spot for quite a while when he came up with a huge clam. He had a hard time getting a good grip on it with his beak, causing a few false starts, but he got up in the air, barely, and dropped it. It didn’t break open, and he tried it again, over and over until he finally was able to get it broken enough to peel the shell off like an orange. I thought, good for you, and then I thought, you must be really happy now that you got that huge clam. At that moment, he looked around, flew to another spot and picked up an other clam and started the whole thing over again.



He wasn’t happy. He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t satisfied. He just was. He was just being a seagull, doing what seagulls do. Surviving.



And then, after four hours of sitting in the cold and wind and rain, God spoke to me.



“I created the seagulls to survive. I did not created you to survive. I created you to live.”



I want to live. I want to find joy and purpose and enjoy the journey. I want God to speak to me through seagulls and trees and good friends and sermons and songs. I want my sister’s death to mean something. I want her to be proud of the life I lived after she was gone. I do not want to face her in heaven and when she asks me what I’ve been doing since the last time we saw each other tell her that I survived.



I have thought so much about my purpose since she’s been gone, and lately I have kind of given up on the idea that I have one, but the other day I was watching seagulls down at Owen’s beach and remembered.



I think I’ll get up and start to live.