A Plan For Us

My wife and I are on vacation in Kauai and our rental home is located on the Makai Golf Course. It’s a stunningly beautiful golf course next to Hanalei Bay that is home to a myriad of birds and sea creatures. In fact, outside our sliding glass doors are four brown baby Albatross, a rare and highly protected species of bird. The way they are raised is very unique and a bit terrifying. Let me explain why.

To begin with, these four baby Albatross are located on the edge of a golf course fairway. They will squat down in some of the deep rough, but basically they are nesting in plain sight. In late June, when the chicks are about 6 months old, they “fledge”, which is their first true flight. Up until this time,  the young albatross make practice runs in the grass, jumping into the air and crashing down in a few feet.  Occasionally, they catch the wind for a longer leap, but never more than 20 feet.  It is obvious they are not in control of flight yet so they remain close to their original nest site, although they will sometimes travel to adjacent areas.

Fuzzy Brown Baby Albatross

Albatross Chick at 6 months old

Mysteriously, each chick knows when the day has come to fledge.  Behavior changes radically.  The chick appears nervous and agitated, walking into areas previously unknown.  Eventually, he or she finds a path to the bluffs at the end of the golf course, overlooking the ocean.  Until this day, the albatross has not seen the ocean up close.  The bluffs are 150-200 feet above the crashing water below.  This has to be a daunting sight for a young bird who has never flown yet.

Albatross practices his running and flapping skills

What happens next is incredible.  After testing the wind at their take-off point, each chick eventually commits by running towards the edge of the cliff and taking off for the very first time.  Once they have lifted off, they fly over the horizon and start searching for where to fish and to live.  Their first flight takes them out of the sight of land, where they have lived their entire lives.  Having been fed by their parents, a chick has never seen what food looks like in the wild.  The parents are not around on fledge day, so each chick has to learn to find and capture food on their own.

Talk about an eventful day.  The chick sees the ocean up close for the very first time, jumps off a high cliff, experiences powered flight, flies out of sight of land, searches the vast Pacific for the food he or she has never seen, sets down on water for the first time, spends the first night on the open ocean, and that first night is one of many.  The chick remains on the open water, without touching land, for 3-5 years,  They only return to land after their maturing period to start the courting process.  Many chicks hatched in Kauai return years later to the same exact spot where they started life, and begin to raise chicks of their own.

It was fun to watch the young Albatross chicks practicing running and flapping their wings. But it also made me think about the times in my life when I had to tackle difficult and scary situations for the very first time. Leaving home when I was 16, my first real job, getting married, my first child, the unexpected death of my father, and so much more. All of us experience scary times when we have to make a leap, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that if the leap we take is a leap of faith, it isn’t so scary after all. And what is a “leap of faith”… trusting God’s movement in our lives and being confident that He has a plan for us.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not yet see.

~ Hebrews 11:1