A Tale of Two Gulls

There is a smell the ocean has that nothing inland can fake. Salt, and something underneath the salt, cold water and living things and air that has traveled a long way to reach you. I live inland now. I did not realize how much I had been missing that smell until the day we finally got down to San Diego. I stepped out of the car, and it hit me all at once — that's it, that's the thing I've been missing.

Everything about the ocean is in motion. Nothing about it feels rushed. Waves, birds, wind, sea lions sliding in and out of the water — none of it holds still for a second. And somehow, standing in front of all that motion, a stillness settles into me that I cannot explain.

I love the beach enough to put up with what loving it actually costs on a summer afternoon: the traffic, the parking, the crowds thick enough that you lose sight of the water until you're standing right on top of it. None of that mattered by the time we were finally walking the bluffs above La Jolla Cove that afternoon, bright light, people everywhere. I had come for all of it — the salt air, the motion, the stillness hiding inside the motion.

I always bring my camera on these walks, but I am not really looking for animals. I am looking for the story. That afternoon, it turned out to be a tale of two gulls, and a photographer behind her lens.

So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing that moves, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. — Genesis 1:21

Every one of those creatures came from the same hands that made me. Maybe that is why the story found me instead of the other way around. Have you ever stood somewhere and felt something so familiar, and yet you could not put your finger on why? That happened to me looking at a colony of cormorants, hundreds of them crowded along a white, sun-bleached bluff. Something pulled at me, and I did not know what. What is this? Why does it feel so familiar? I stood there, camera lifted, waiting for my own question to answer itself. A full minute passed before it did — and when it did, I found myself whispering the answer out loud, right there on the sidewalk.

I don't want to be abstract art. I want to fit in.

The cormorants stood packed onto that bluff, dark and still and nearly identical, one solid mass with no single bird distinguishable from the next. I recognized myself in that sameness. We all want to be seen as our own person, and then most of us go looking for the exact same haircut, the same shade of paint, the color everyone else already decided was this year's color. I don't want to disappear into the crowd. I also don't want to be the one who stands out in it. One gull, though, had clearly not gotten that memo — pale against the darker birds around him, but pale too against the bleached rock beneath them, so that for a moment he nearly disappeared into the one thing that should have made him stand out. My own private game of Where's Waldo, right there on the rocks. I do not know exactly why the gull did not blend in — wasn't he just another bird among hundreds of others?

That was the first gull. The second one caught me completely off guard.

I found him a little further along the same walk, half-hidden behind a low bush. His wing was broken, hanging wrong at his side, feathers dragging in the dirt instead of folded tight the way every other wing around him was. He had tucked himself back, as far from notice as he could manage.

Two gulls, same afternoon, doing exactly opposite things. One could not blend into a crowd no matter how hard he tried. One was working with everything he had to disappear completely. And something about each of them hit me the same way, fast, before I had words for it — not "how sad" or "how funny," but something closer to recognition. Like looking at a photograph of myself I did not remember anyone taking.

It took me longer than I want to admit to actually understand what I had recognized. I have been both of those gulls. On the days nothing is visibly wrong, some part of me still wants to disappear into sameness. And some days it almost works — I blend in well enough that no one has to look twice. But blending in never actually made me one of the crowd. I was still exactly who God made me to be — known, wanted, His — whether anyone noticed that day or not. On the days something is visibly broken, that same part of me wants to disappear even more, hiding the break where no one has to look at it. Different postures. Same reason underneath both. The reason?

Fear. Not the kind that makes your heart race, but a quieter kind, one most of us have gotten good at hiding even from ourselves: the fear that if I were truly seen, all of me, I would not be wanted. That is why I blend in — if no one can pick me out of a crowd, no one can reject what they find. And that is the same fear, turned inside out, that makes me hide when I am broken. If the wound is the first thing anyone sees, surely it will be the last thing they want to be close to.

But fear like that does not come from nowhere. It takes hold in exactly one place: the moment I forget who I already am. My identity was never supposed to come from the crowd, and it was never supposed to come from my hurt either.

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. — 2 Corinthians 5:17

Known. Wanted. Made new. That was already true of me before I ever stood on that sidewalk, whether I remembered it that day or not. Fear only gets to run the show when I forget Who I belong to, and let the crowd, or the wound, answer the question of who I am instead.

I found myself wondering: how could I ever let myself forget something so true?

The honest answer is that I rarely even notice while it is happening.

Sometimes that fear grows slowly, quietly, one small day at a time — I do not remember deciding to stop praying the way I used to. I just noticed, months later, how long it had been since I had. Nobody announces the day they stop paying attention to God. It is more like forgetting to water a plant. Nothing looks different for a while. Then one day it does.

Sometimes it happens fast instead, when something catches me off guard and old habits take over before I even think to stop them — checking the crowd, reaching for the bush.

And sometimes it happens because I have sat too long in an ache with no clear cause, a restlessness in my chest, a hunger nothing I reach for actually satisfies, until I start grabbing at anything that might quiet the ache, instead of waiting on the One who actually could satisfy the hunger.

Whatever the cause, what fear leaves behind is emptiness — plain and quiet, sitting exactly where trust used to be. Nothing wrong with how I was made. Just space, left empty because I let something else try to fill that emptiness instead of the God who was always meant to be there.

And somewhere in that emptiness, a sound emerges. A whimper. A groaning too deep for words. A desperate cry. Sometimes I swallow that cry, afraid that voicing it means I do not have enough faith. But there are other times it comes pouring out anyway, no matter how hard I try to hold it back.

How long, Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? — Psalm 13:1

I have prayed some version of those questions more times than I can count, usually somewhere I thought no one could hear me — the car, the shower, the middle of the night when the house was quiet enough that even a whisper felt too loud to risk. And then one day I found out those were not only my words. David cried them first, thousands of years before I ever stood on that sidewalk, and people have been praying them right alongside him ever since. The same cry. The same ache. The same hunger to be found. I was never as alone in those questions as I felt asking them.

Both gulls, I realized, carried the same cry for me — not "notice me," not "don't notice me," but something older and more honest than either one: do You see me? Do You hear me? Am I still Yours, even like this?

God was never fooled by either hiding place. He knew both of them before I ever tried to hide in either one.

You have searched me, Lord, and You know me... Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? — Psalm 139:1, 7

God heard the cry before I ever voiced it, and He was already there, long before I worked up the courage to ask if anyone was listening.

Fitting in was never going to fill that emptiness, even if I had managed to disappear completely. No crowd was ever going to reach that deep. Only God could fill it exactly.

I saw what being filled instead of hidden actually looks like, a little further along the same colony, where the nests sat close enough to the sidewalk for anyone to see, if they thought to look. One cormorant sat curled protectively over her chicks. When she noticed me watching, she did not shrink back. She stood, just enough, so I could see the chicks underneath her. Not performing. Not hiding. Simply willing to be seen, protecting exactly what she loved. No crowd to disappear into. No bush to hide behind. Just seen, and unafraid of being seen.

I am not fully there yet. I still catch myself checking the crowd before I decide how much of myself to show. I still have days I would rather tuck the broken thing behind a bush than let anyone see it dragging. I am still practicing what I already know: fear only wins when I forget, again, who I already am.

I watched that mother cormorant stand, unhurried, unashamed, and something in me wanted that kind of ease so badly it almost hurt. She was not performing an identity. She was just living out of one she never had to question.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you have ever caught yourself checking the crowd, or hiding whatever is broken behind the nearest bush, you are not alone in that, any more than I was. Your identity was never meant to come from the crowd you are standing in, and it was never meant to come from the hurt you are hiding behind a bush. God saw you before you had a name, before you had a wound, before you ever learned to disappear.

For You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother's womb. — Psalm 139:13

If there is an emptiness in you too, one you have tried filling with sameness, with hiding, with anything that almost worked but never quite did, I want you to realize nothing is wrong with how you were made. That emptiness was always meant to be filled by God, and by nothing else. I have not stopped needing that reminder. I doubt I ever will. But every time I let God fill me instead of reaching for something else, I find I do not need the crowd or the bush anymore. I have learned it was never really about blending in or standing out. It was always about closeness to God, and reaching out to Him - because He is waiting for you.