Originally painted live at Fresh Streams Conference 2025. 

Swifts are magical birds! I am inspired by them year in and year out as they fly in from Africa each May to nest in the chapel at the back of where I live in Great Gransden in rural Cambridgeshire. The majority don’t actually nest, but rather they tear around like screeching boy racers swirling and pursuing one another in noisy merriment as if in some perpetual game of chase! 

In the evening they ascend using the air currents and rise high up above us into what is known as the ‘convective boundary layer.’ This is the humid, hazy part of the atmosphere where swifts can learn from each other and also forecast the weather. This twilight ascension is referred to as 'Vesper Flights.' In the book with the same title, Helen Macdonald writes: ‘What they are doing is flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly, orienting themselves.’ She goes on to write: ‘Thinking about swifts has made me think more carefully about the ways in which I’ve dealt with difficulty.’

In a lesson on how not to worry, Jesus encouraged his first friends to look at the flowers of the field and the birds of the air. Jesus teaches us about what God is like by saying: ‘If He looks after the birds, of course He will look after you. Worrying does not do any good; who here can claim to add even an hour to his life by worrying?’ (Taken from the Bible, Matthew chapter 6

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