Flapping Is Still Flying

A boat dropped me on a remote island where puffins gather every summer to breed, and I had come chasing one photograph: a puffin caught mid-launch, wings fully spread, the instant it finally trusted the air enough to leave the cliff. I could not have told you in words why that exact moment mattered so much to me. Maybe that is why I wanted the photograph instead of the words — a picture says the thing I cannot. The island itself was barely more than a rock rising straight out of the ocean, with just enough pebbled beach on one side to call it a landing.

The moment my feet touched those pebbles, an excited flurry of energy hit me from every direction. Puffins everywhere, football-shaped and comical, bright beaks catching the light, all along the cliffs in front of me. Some only paced the edge, half opening their wings and folding them closed again. Puffins are built for the sea, for diving and swimming, and on land they looked less like birds in their element and more like guests who had wandered somewhere unfamiliar.

I found myself laughing out loud as I watched them. I remembered reading somewhere that a group of puffins is called a circus, and that was exactly what I was looking at. One seemed to be talking a big story while it rested on the rock. Another lifted one foot as if this was finally the moment it was going to fly, then set that foot right back down without going anywhere. Still another crept toward the edge of the cliff, wings half open, and then thought better of it. Every puffin around me was moving in a different direction at once, no two of them doing the same thing.

Then the whole island went eerily still. Every bird stopped at once, on the rocks and in the water, as if a single switch had been thrown for the entire colony, and I went still right along with them, my own body freezing before my mind had caught up enough to ask why. It took a moment before I slowly turned to see what had happened, and caught the last of an eagle's shadow sliding off the island and out over the water. I have known that kind of fear before, the kind that arrives before you have time to think, and stops you cold.

I keep coming back to that moment, because the eagle was never actually a danger to us right then. It had already passed. What froze the whole colony was only its shadow, the memory of a threat more than the threat itself, and that shadow held us there far longer than the danger ever lasted. Standing there, I heard God's word carried on the breeze the way a whisper is carried, and I knew God was speaking.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline. 2 Timothy 1:7

Frozen there, I understood why fear is so easy to focus on. Fear arrives faster than a thought, while power, love, and self-discipline wait for me to reach for them. That is the contrast in this verse: fear came to me uninvited, but the gifts God gave me have to be opened on purpose.

Slowly the fear passed, but nothing else changed. One by one, the colony came back to life, and every puffin went right back to exactly what it had been doing before the shadow ever crossed. The same pacing, the same half-open wings, the same march to the edge of the cliff and back again, as if nothing had happened at all.

Photographing puffins is a real test of patience. I stood there for twenty minutes with my camera trained on one puffin. It stretched, it flapped, it gave me every signal that this was the moment it would fly, and every time it settled right back down. I had to smile when I realized I was watching myself. I have been pacing the edge of my own island for months, with a camera full of photographs and a plan to turn these blog stories into videos, my own voice reading each story over the pictures. I want the stories God whispers to me to reach people who may never read a blog, people who might watch and listen. I keep telling myself I will learn the editing and the voiceover soon, and then I do a hundred other things instead. I even sat down to write this very blog post weeks ago, just to avoid learning video, and then I put off the blog too, until here I am at the deadline with neither one finished. Self-discipline, the gift I need most, still sits unopened.

The eagle's shadow was the sudden kind of fear, the kind that freezes you all at once. What kept me pacing was the quieter kind, a fear I could not even name for a long time. Part of me is afraid of looking like a goofy puffin, flapping on a ledge while everyone watches. But underneath it all is a bigger fear: that I will flap so hard to reach people with these stories, and reach nobody.

And then, while my puffin went back to pacing, another puffin took flight.

The launch did not look graceful. The puffin lifted off with its feet still dangling and its wings working hard, pushing against the air as if every beat were a decision. To stay in the air at all, a puffin has to keep beating those short wings, fast and hard, the whole way out. That puffin did not wait to find out who was watching.

I whispered a verse back into the same breeze, not sure whether I was declaring it or only hoping it.

For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.
Philippians 4:13

I have often quoted that verse as if it meant I could do anything I set my mind to. But Paul was not talking about willpower. He wrote those words about facing whatever came his way, with little or with plenty, leaning on Christ's strength instead of his own. That puffin was not flapping its way off the ledge because it finally believed in itself either. It was flying because it trusted what it had been given. Maybe that is where I have gone wrong. My self-discipline has stayed unopened because I keep trying to open it with willpower, when the power God gave me was meant to come first. I believe that verse, and I have watched it prove true in my own life, yet here I am, still standing at the edge of my own island. I know better. Living it better might be only one flight away.

I watched that puffin beat its way out over the water, and I caught myself wondering whether a puffin ever wishes it were an eagle. I know I do. Who does not want to soar, effortless and sure, riding the wind without a single wasted motion? Almost nothing has ever come to me that easily. I have had to work hard for nearly everything I know, flapping where other people seem to glide, and for years I took that struggle as proof that some things were simply not meant for me. But a puffin never soars. It flaps hard every moment it is in the air, and yet it stays airborne. Flapping is still flying. Maybe that is why I treasure the things I have worked hardest for. I know what each one cost me.

When the puffin was only a speck over the water, I looked around at the island under my feet, one small rise of stone with the ocean pressing in on every side. For a moment all that water looked like everything I did not know how to do, stretching out in all directions and keeping me right where I stood. The puffins do not see the water that way. They spend most of their lives out on the open sea, and the island is only where they gather each summer to raise their young. Every puffin flying over that water hatched right there on that island, and not one of them was meant to stay.

I have been treating my own comfortable ground like a place I was meant to stay. That limit was never in the water. It was in me, like so many limits I have placed on myself that God never placed there. The life Jesus gave me was never meant to stay on my island, and neither were the stories God has whispered to me.

For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago.
Ephesians 2:10

Here is what I nearly missed. Leaving the island does not mean leaving the Rock. Jesus is not the ground I leave behind when I finally jump. Jesus is the Rock under my feet while I stand at the edge, the strength in my wings when I fly, and the solid place where I land. The life Jesus gives does not stay behind when I leave the ledge. That life flies with me.

Before I left the island, I watched one more puffin take flight, and this time I noticed its shadow, dark and sharp on the stone below. The eagle's shadow had frozen the whole colony. This shadow fell across the stone only because a puffin had finally left the ledge and flown toward the light.

I came to that island chasing one photograph, and I did get my shot. But the puffins had something better to give me than a picture. They handed me a lesson I can live, not just hang on a wall, and that is a far better gift than any photograph.

For me, the jump does not look like a leap off a cliff. It looks like time in my studio, learning to create a video and then actually creating one. That is the gift of self-discipline I left unopened for so long, and today I am choosing to open it, not with willpower this time, but with the power God gave me first. I am choosing to learn instead of fear. I do not have to prove I am ready before I am allowed to go, and I do not have to know who will watch. That part was never mine to control. The flapping is mine to do, and where it lands is in God's hand.

If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there [God] Your hand will guide me, and Your strength will support me. Psalm 139:9–10

Even the farthest ocean is not too far for God's hand. Wherever you have been pacing, whatever gift you have left unopened on your own small island, the Rock is already under you, and the strength is already in your wings. It is time to leave the ledge.