Sheltered

My wife Gemma and I live in a seaside town on the east coast of England. Like many coastal towns there are lots of seagulls. We live quite near to the seafront, and looking around our house during the nesting season you can see pairs of gulls on most of the rooftops of the surrounding houses, including ours. On one side of our house the upper rooms look out on to a complex of garage units.

This year a pair of gulls chose to build their nest on the flat roof of the two garages nearest our house. The female chose to lay her eggs at the beginning of a sustained heat wave. I watched with admiration as she and her male partner took it in turns to sit on the eggs, day after day, completely exposed to the blazing sun. Then one day I looked and could just see two feathery bundles moving beneath them as they sat there in the unrelenting heat.

As the two chicks eventually emerged from the nest, I had a perfect view of them from our second-floor window as they began to develop. As the heat wave continued without a break, the parent birds could fly away to search for food and escape the sun’s heat, but the two chicks had nowhere to hide from its rays. When the parent birds returned, the young birds would crouch beneath them for shade as the adult birds stood and took the full heat of the sun.

Watching the two chicks spending hours each day without any shade when their parents were absent, I tried to think of what I could do to give them some relief from the sun. Finally, I bought a storage crate from a local store and placed it on its side on the garage roof, weighted down so that it wouldn’t move in the wind. I went back to our upstairs room to see the young bird’s reaction. With an almost childlike delight I watched them finding shade from the sun by hiding in the crate or crouching against its sides.

As I’d watched the young gulls enduring exposure to the sun’s heat day after day, I’d felt that I had to do something and not just be a spectator watching them suffer. It’s caused me to think of how God acted in response to our suffering as human beings separated from Him by sin, exposed without shelter to the pain and sorrows of life and the merciless attacks of the powers of darkness.

We see His compassionate heart towards us demonstrated in Jesus, who on the cross willingly took the full heat of the punishment and judgement for sin that was rightly ours, and opened the way for you and me to come and find forgiveness and shelter in life’s storms and battles.