The Important Thing Is To Get To The Water.

When I was growing up in Western Washington, we’d sometimes take ferry trips across Puget Sound. Often we’d go from Seattle over to Bremerton. Maybe we’d go from Whidbey Island to Port Townsend. Or perhaps from Anacortes to the San Juan Islands. My older brother and I would always stand on the outside deck at the bow of the ferry, watching for anything living – lion’s mane jelly fish, seals, seabirds – if it was alive and moving, we were interested.

We’d frequently see members of a family of birds (Alcidae) that seem to fill the same ecological niche in the northern hemisphere that the penguins fill in the southern hemisphere (regardless what kids’ cartoons or advertisements may say, polar bears and penguins are not found together in nature). This bird family includes such birds as the puffins, murres, auks, and guillemots. Like penguins, these are (mostly) black and white birds which dive deep to catch fish. Being seabirds, family members tend to nest at the ocean’s shore – edges of cliffs or burrows in the turf at the tops of island cliffs are typical nesting sites.

One species of alcid we’d see from time to time as we crossed the water was the Marbled Murrelet. There was something different about this bird. Nobody knew where it nested. I can remember when I was a sophomore biology student in the mid 1960’s spending the summer at a marine field station on the southern tip of Fidalgo Island in Puget Sound. Several times I joined in on adventures involving climbing the slopes of loose rock above Deception Pass looking for crevices in which the birds might be nesting. None had ever been seen among the other alcids in their nesting colonies. Where the bird reproduced was a real mystery.

Then, in 1974, a logger cutting old-growth timber somewhere in the Northwest happened to find a strange nest on a larger branch of a giant tree. Mystery solved. However, the tree was not exactly close to the shore. And here begins the adventure. When it is time for the young to fledge, the parent must coax it off its perch to begin the first flight to the sea, where it will spend most of its life. I suspect most who read this will have seen pictures of the young sea turtles making their 50 yard dash across the sand for the relative safety of the ocean. This is the same story, but writ much larger. And while the turtles are admittedly exposed to marauding gulls, the young murrelet must fly from its nest an average distance of about 3 miles (5 kilometers), although there are reports of at least one nest having been found about 45 miles (75 kilometers) inland.

How does this relate to us in our daily walk? Well, just consider what that fledgling is trying to reach, and what it must go through to get there. It draws to my mind the story from the book of John, chapter 4, where Christ has offered the Samaritan woman some special water, and she asks, in verse 11, “Where then do You get that living water?” To which Christ, in verses 13 and 14 replies, “"Whoever drinks of this water [from the well beside which they were sitting] will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life."

Are we as willing to fly as great a distance to that living water as the young murrelet is to get to the ocean? Yes, Christ offers it freely, but we must desire it greatly. We have to recognize that it, like the ocean to the murrelet, means our very lives spiritually. We can’t get it as long as we continue sitting on that tree branch in the middle of the forest.

You're cleared for takeoff. Have a great flight!

Dr. G