“Look at those birds!” I exclaimed to my Smitty as we squinted across the inlet of the Great Atlantic flowing into the Nauset Salt Marsh, across to a sandbar littered with small, black figures. I left my binoculars at home, so we’d have to simply marvel from a distance at the sheer number of birdies lounging in the sun. I wondered what they were… Terns? Shearwater’s? Sandpipers?
There aren’t many people on this remote section of the Cape Cod National Seashore, a good stretch of the leg from Coast Guard beach where our umbrella and summer reading awaited our return from our pilgrimage to what I nicknamed “Cape Horn”. It’s a favorite place of mine, there at the mouth of the Salt Marsh inlet where the waves don’t follow the rules even more than usual, skipping and changing direction faster than my youngest son’s video game character when he’s playing Super Smash Brothers.
A young couple approached us, (we would soon learn they were on their honeymoon) binoculars in hand, excited about the wildlife on the distant sandy outcrop. “Did you see them?” they pointed. We joined right in on the delights of nature, and then (in keeping with seaside language) they lowered the boom: “So many seals all together!”
Seals. No wings. They don’t fly. Those weren’t birds at all. We weren’t seeing things clearly from that distance. We made assumptions. We know what seals look like. (They hang around the beaches all the time in singles or small pods - hence the ever present shark alert flags at the National Seashore beaches). But because we couldn’t see the details of their amusing, blubbery bodies and their adorable, whiskered snouts, we imagined flocks with feathers and beaks.
Even as the light dawned, I started converting the story in the natural world to the great truth in the spiritual: without the right perspective, you can’t see clearly. Without the binoculars of faith, the gospel becomes about good behavior instead of amazing grace. A life’s direction and motives are skewed because the ladder being climbed is leaning against the wrong wall - of this world’s success, instead of eternal purpose. A person is being judged by outward appearance, rather that through the clear, illuminating glass of their infinite worth as a person created in the image of God.
Wrong perspective is an easy trip-up. Ask me how I know…
How grateful I am that the word of God is described as “a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path”. How superbly Jesus changed the whole paradigm of religion, bringing God the Father so close that we could see what He’s really like, Christ being “the exact image of the Father”, both Just and the Justifier. How wildly beautiful (like the glittering, dancing waves forging their way into Nauset Marsh) is the word of God, bearing witness with perfect perspective, from beginning to end, to the great pursuit of God for sinners like you and me.
The ancient paths to perspective remain the same forever. The truth of the bible, the prayers of God’s people, the fellowship of the saints: all these keep the man or woman of God from blundering under false doctrines and crazy headed ideas. They aren’t glitzy, but they are the prescribed binoculars, bringing the clarity of the living Holy Spirit, that keep us from seeing birds, when what’s really out there are seals.
A goofy little story, I know. But there’s lots of parables on this path we’re on. May yours be filled with wonder, and the perspective of faith.
Your friend on the Pilgrim Road,
Loriann Smith
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