Continuing in our faith!

Colossians 1:23 “…continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.”

So, I have a fairly dramatic bird phobia. It stems from a family vacation where I was innocently swimming in the Pacific Ocean, only to come up for breath and have a pelican about 10 inches from my face. My family on shore watching thought it was hilarious—me, not so much.

That being said, I’m pretty much always aware and on guard when there is any kind of bird population around. I was riding in the car the other day with a friend, when I noticed two rather large flocks of join together in the space right in front of us. And, as much as I don’t like birds, it is always been fascinating to me to watch these murmurations (vocabulary word for the day—that’s what it’s called when birds do their mass flying exercises!) 

To me, one of the reasons that it’s so interesting is because we always hear about how small the brain of a bird is, yet, once they are flying in a crowd, it’s like they all have some kind of telepathy going on, and are able to all change direction in a split second. It also appears to me (who granted, has no kind of aviary training) that there’s no real rhyme or reason to what they are doing. You can see them take flight, make all kinds of twists and turns, only to return to relatively the same space a minute later.

As we were watching the flock in flight the other day, I was commenting on how it’s so weird that they are able to all stay in sync, when my friend pointed out a lone bird who seemed to have missed it. All the other birds had taken off, exhibited some rather dramatic flight patterns (at one point even doing a thing where the group split in half and then seconds later rejoined), but this one guy had just missed his cues. All the rest of the birds had landed, but he was left alone in the air, circling the space where they had just been, almost unaware that he had been left behind.

Watching these birds reminded me a lot of what we are like in our journey with Christ. There are seasons of life when we seem to have it all together. We are in sync with our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, we are confident in who we are and what God is calling us to do, and everything seems to be going great.

And then there are other seasons. There are times when we feel like the one who is left behind. We are flying along, everything seems to be going great, and then something that we don’t anticipate happens, and before we know it, we look up and are flying alone. Maybe some of your support system fails- a relationship fades, someone moves away, a disagreement occurs—or maybe you encounter a doubt in your faith, or experience something that you can’t seem to reconcile with what you once believed.

But the thing is, even when we are flying alone, the important thing is to keep flying. That bird that was on his own didn’t just fall to the ground. He kept after it—kept flapping his wings, kept circling the area and trying to find his bearings, until he rejoined the crowd. Doubts in your faith will happen. Doubts in your calling will happen. There will be times that all of us feel like we are alone in our faith experience. However, it’s in those times that we MUST press on. We, like the bird, have to put one foot in front of the other, and keep walking our faith journey. It may be at a slowed pace, and it may feel more like a hobble than a sprint, and that’s ok. The important thing is not to give up the journey, to not give up on God or one another, to have the faith of a sparrow (or a starling?) and to continue the walk until we are once again able to fly.

Discussion Questions:

• -          Are you currently in a season where you are flying with the flock, or are you flying on your own right now?
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• -          What can we do to help those who are circling by themselves? How can we encourage them on the journey?