Glide, Swoop, and Soar

Faith Lessons from the Wandering Albatross

By Sandy Mayle

It was, for me, the Winter of the Wandering Albatross.

No, none had wandered from their Antarctic climate to relatively warm Pennsylvania, where I live. I’d never personally seen one. Yet suddenly it was albatross this and albatross that, and to his credit my husband never batted an eye when I bought the huge, used-but-expensive book: Albatross: Their World, Their Ways. Or when I brought home a child’s library book on… you guessed it.

Why this peculiar interest? Because I’d read (where, I can’t remember) that there is a seabird that flies over the Southern Ocean… for years. It doesn’t ever touch land in all that time. I was gobsmacked. Not touching land for years?

It got even more compelling…

Glide

This avian flies straight through cyclones that put ships in peril. And he doesn’t flap his way through the teeth of it; he glides. He just adjusts the tilt of his wings and cruises on.

He’s a winged wonder, and the very picture of the faith the Lord wanted to shape in me. I’d been realizing that many of the thoughts rolling unbidden through my mind kept me earthbound:

I’m afraid. I don’t know what to do.

Why is this happening? I don’t understand.

God, I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t seem to get this right.

How kind of the Lord to invite me to “look at the birds of the air” (Matt. 6:26)—this one in particular—and learn to glide in faith.