Young herring gull

Here in the garret where I spend time chilling out with Jesus before the day kicks off, this morning there came a seagull – a brown dappled teenager herring gull – just above my head, scavenging moss from the rim of the skylight.

I watched him, three feet above me.  In between the peckings and nibblings, we looked at each other, eye to eye.

And in the bird’s eye, I saw intelligence, and a quality that lifted my heart – call it gladness, contentment, happiness, something benign, something at peace with life and itself.  I do not think of seagulls as kind birds – fairly heartless, really – but in this bird’s eye, something that in a human eye always means kindness was there.

If a bird can be good, this bird was good.  And it can, of course, because God saw all that he had made, and pronounced it good.