The Seagull

        Imagine this scene: you are on the Florida coast. The sun is setting like a  gigantic orange ball. It's the cool evening on a vacant, isolated stretch of  beach. The water is lapping at the shore, the breeze is blowing slightly.

        There are one or two joggers and a couple of fisherman. Most people have  gone home for the day.

        You look up and you see an old man with curved shoulders, bushy eyebrows, and bony features hobbling down the beach carrying a bucket. He carries the bucket up to the pier, a dock that goes out into the water. He stands on the dock and you notice he is looking up into the sky and all of  a sudden you see a mass of dancing dots. You soon recognize that they are seagulls. They are coming out of nowhere. The man takes out of his bucket handfuls of shrimp and begins to throw them on the dock. The seagulls come and land all around him. Some land on his shoulders, some land on  his hat, and they eat the shrimp. Long after the shrimp are gone his feathered friends linger. The old man and the birds.
 
        What is going on here? Why is this man feeding seagulls? What could compel him to do this as he does week after week?
 
        The man in that scene was Eddie Rickenbacher, a famous World War II pilot. His plane, The Flying Fortress, went down in 1942 and no one thought he would be rescued. Perhaps you have read or heard how he and his eight passengers escaped death by climbing into two rafts for thirty days. They fought thirst, the sun, and sharks. Some of the sharks were nine feet long. The boats were only eight feet long. But what nearly killed them  was starvation. Their rations were gone within eight days and they didn't have anything left.
 
        Rickenbacher wrote that even on those rafts, every day they would have a daily afternoon devotional and prayer time. One day after the devotional, Rickenbacher leaned back and put his hat over his eyes and tried to get some sleep. Within a few moments he felt something on his head. He knew in an instant it was a seagull which had perched on his raft. But he knew that they were hundreds of miles out to sea. Where did this seagull  come from?

        He was also certain that if he didn't get that seagull he would die. Soon all the others on the two boats noticed the seagull. No one spoke, no one moved. Rickenbacher quickly grabbed the seagull and with thanksgiving, they ate the flesh of the bird. They used the intestines for fish bait and survived.
 
        Rickenbacher never forgot that visitor who came from a foreign place. That sacrificial guest. Every week, he went out on the pier with a bucket of shrimp and said thank you, thank you, thank you.
 
        The apostle Paul wrote, "For Christ's love compels us..." (2 Corinthians 5:14). The word "compels" means literally, "leaves me no choice." Paul is saying, "I have no choice but to respond to the love of Christ with my whole being to say thank you, thank you, thank you!"
 
       When we serve Christ, when we share God's love with others, when we come to church every week to worship him, we don't do it begrudgingly. We do it with thankful hearts because we really have no choice. It's how we say thank you!
 
        The world wants our best, but God wants our all.
 
          "Love the Lord your God with all your heart,  with all your soul, with all your strength."

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