This morning there was a seagull on the freeway.
He was causing traffic to go from 70 mph to 60.
Because he was flying at bumper-level. Frantically. Urgently. Desperately.
He was flapping his little white wings so hard, and he was swerving in and out of lanes, almost falling to the ground but lifting himself up at the very last minute.
As I watched this, and as I fearfully drove behind him, I wanted to stop driving. On the freeway.
I wanted to get out and make everyone stop and grab the bird and hold him and hug him and tell him everything was alright. I wanted to give him a little crab to eat and stroke his feathers and kiss his head.
Because seagulls aren’t meant for freeways. They weren’t meant to outfly them.
But I didn’t do that. Instead, I just started crying. Sobbing, really. I cried all the way up to when I got coffee.
Because I am that seagull. We are that seagull.
We aren’t made for this world and it’s giant metal cars driving behind us, threatening our lives and possessing the ability to destroy us, but that’s where we are. We’re seagulls on a freeway, trying to flap our wings hard enough to survive.
It’s futile. We won’t. We can’t. The cars will get us or we’ll exhaust ourselves to death.
and as I silently cried in my car, I thought about my seagullness and the world’s carness, and I felt a heavy burden on my heart. Until I realized that Jesus is outside of the freeway. He’s calling us to rest. He’s calling us, in our seagull language, to top trying to outfly things that we were not made to outfly, and to come sit in his tree. or on his porch. or wherever seagulls sit.
Just like how I felt this morning, Jesus wants to hold us and smooth our feathers, kiss our heads, and whisper comfort into our hearts until they stop racing and start resting. The difference is that Jesus actually stopped traffic. He got out of the car on the freeway and got hit by a semi truck so that the seagull could get away.
But I’m still trying to get away from these things that Christ put an end to by stopping traffic. The cars can’t get me anymore. They can taunt me, they can torment me, they can even run into me and make me stop breathing, but they cannot get me.
The cars can’t get us anymore, but we still have to stop exhausting ourselves by worrying about them and make the choice to rest in our Traffic Jam.
