March 3, 2024

Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25

The kolea had successfully made his first flight to Hawai’i the previous fall. He’d hatched a young bird in Alaska, he’d been fed by his parents, he’d learned to find his own food, and eventually he’d taken off for the long journey to Hawai’i. He’d found a spot here to look for worms and seeds and berries. He’d worn his mottled tan and brown feathers through the winter months. He was starting to put on the black and white feathering of summer.

He’d also been paying attention to people. I advise you to pay good attention to people, because you are people, and paying attention to people who are people like you helps you to learn how to be people, and it also helps you to know what other people are going to do, like when they might step backward and one people steps on another’s people’s toes.

Um. Person’s toes.

While it’s useful for people to listen to people, it’s not always so useful for other creatures. For some reason, this kolea heard a lot of people talking about signs. If you want to find your way to Hilo, follow the signs. If you want to find your way to the beach, follow the signs. If you want to go not too fast and not too slow, follow the signs.

Where, wondered the kolea, would he find signs on the way to Alaska?

Mind you, people do put signs out on the waters. If you look around Hilo Bay, there are marker buoys out there to help boats find their way to the harbor mouth and back home. They’re easier to see at night, when they blink red and green. As you get further from the shore, however, there are fewer of them, and not many at all across the vast expanse of ocean.

The kolea hadn’t noticed any on the way to Hawai’i, and didn’t expect to see any on the way to Alaska.

“Where will I find the signs?” he asked.

“Why do you want signs?” an older kolea wanted to know.

“People use them all the time,” he answered, and the other kolea thought he meant kolea people rather than human people, and flew away because he wasn’t making any sense.

It was another older kolea who sat him down for a heart-to-heart, brain-to-brain, and feather-to-feather talk.

“What signs do you expect to see?” she wanted to know.

“Clouds, stars, lights, glowing plankton in the ocean,” he said.

“Did you see any coming here?” she asked.

“Of course I did,” he told her, because those things happen around the oceans.

“Did they tell you how to get here?” she asked.

Well, no, they hadn’t.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

He gave her an answer that he understood, and she understood, because they’re both kolea and they can fly three days over open ocean without signs, but that I don’t understand because I’m a human person and I don’t know how they do it.

“The signs are inside you,” she told him.

We live with a lot of signs around, it’s true, telling you everything from what the name of this church is to how far it is to Kona. Some things, however, and some of that is in our lives of prayer, take place within us, in our hearts and in our souls. There are signs for that, like the Bible, but down deep we’ll find the guidance of the Holy Spirit to bring us safely home.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Story

I write these stories ahead of time and tell them in worship services from memory. As a result, the prepared text and the told story rarely match. I’m quite pleased how much of the paragraph with all the people I remembered this week.

Photo of a kolea in Hilo by Eric Anderson.