“God, give me a sign.”

People have been praying some version of that prayer for as long as people have prayed.

We want direction. Reassurance. Certainty. We want God to make the next step unmistakably clear.

The Bible is full of people asking for signs. Gideon laid out a fleece. The Pharisees demanded one from Jesus. Even today, Christians are constantly looking for clues that God is trying to tell them something.

Years back, I had a friend who was agonising over what to do with his life. He wanted God to make it crystal clear. Then, walking through town one day, he looked down and saw a Brazil nut wrapper on the ground.

“That’s it!” he thought. “God wants me to be a missionary in Brazil.”

Thank goodness it wasn’t a Mars Bar wrapper.

It sounds ridiculous, but if we’re honest, many of us aren’t all that different. We keep asking God for extraordinary signs while quietly assuming he’ll speak through coincidences, random events or cryptic clues. We ask God to reveal himself, half expecting him to turn the person in front of us into an armadillo or write our name across the clouds.

But what if we’ve been missing the forest for the trees?

What if God is speaking to us all the time, in a way that most of us have completely missed? It’s biblical, hiding in plain sight, and once you start noticing it, it becomes hard to miss.

But, chances are, when I tell you, you’re going to think I’ve finally lost my mind. I can assure you that happened some time ago, so I suppose I’ve got nothing to lose!

Here goes!

I’ve Started Noticing Something

A few days ago, a kookaburra moved into the gum tree outside the window where I spend most mornings writing.

A couple of times a day it lets fly with that unmistakable laugh.

If you’ve never heard one before, it’s hard to explain. It doesn’t sound like a bird. It sounds like someone in the bush has just heard the funniest joke of their life.

At first it was just another noise in the background.

Then I started looking up.

I’d stop writing for a moment and watch it sitting there on the branch. Some mornings it’d stay for ages. Other mornings it’d disappear almost as quickly as it arrived.

It reminded me of something that happened a few weeks earlier.

I was running a bush retreat for a group of men. It’s something I’ve been doing for years now – a space for men to work through grief and make sense of their story. That afternoon, people had shared deeply about what was going on in their lives. It was sacred and honest work.

Then one of the guys quietly pointed towards a gum tree nearby.

Seven kookaburras.

All sitting on the same branch.

Now, if you’re not Australian, that probably doesn’t sound like much. But kookaburras aren’t the sort of birds you usually see lined up together. They’re birds of prey. Seeing one is common enough. Seeing seven perched shoulder to shoulder on the same branch is something I’d never seen before.

It would be a bit like an American looking up and seeing seven bald eagles sitting together in the one tree.

Nobody said much.

We all just sat there looking.

For a couple of minutes, the conversation stopped. Then, one by one, they took off.

It was such a bizarre thing to witness that I’ve been thinking about it ever since, which sounds ridiculous, I know. But the more I read the Bible, the more convinced I’ve become that birds occupy a surprisingly important place in the way God teaches us.

In fact, I think birds may be one of God’s favourite ways of getting our attention.

Hear me out.

Have I Finally Lost My Mind?

By now, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve decided I’ve finally gone off the deep end. “God speaks through birds?” It sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing you’d hear from someone who burns incense, owns too many crystals and begins every sentence with, “The universe told me…”

I understand the reaction because, not that long ago, it would have been mine too. If someone had told me that God speaks through birds, I would have smiled politely, backed away slowly and hoped they didn’t ask for my email address.

The trouble is, I kept running into birds in the Bible.

At first, I only noticed the obvious stories. Noah sends out a raven, then a dove, to discover whether the floodwaters have receded. God commands ravens to feed Elijah in the wilderness. At Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove. Those stories are familiar enough that most Christians barely stop to think about them.

Then I noticed something else.

Jesus didn’t simply use birds as illustrations. He invited people to learn from them.

When he wanted to reassure anxious people that God could be trusted, he didn’t point them towards the stars or the mountains. He said, “Look at the birds of the air.” Luke records the same teaching slightly differently: “Consider the ravens.”

I’ve read those words hundreds of times. I’ve preached on them. I’ve quoted them. Yet it had never occurred to me to ask why Jesus chose birds in the first place. He could have pointed to almost anything in creation. Instead, he deliberately drew his listeners’ attention to the creatures they saw every single day.

The more I looked, the stranger it became. Birds don’t just appear occasionally in the biblical story. Again and again, God seems to use them to reveal something about himself. Sometimes they become signs. Sometimes they become instruments of his provision. Sometimes they become living parables. Either way, they keep showing up.

Which left me with a question I’d somehow never thought to ask.

Why birds?

The People Who Never Forgot How to Look

One of the things I’ve always admired about Aboriginal Australia is its relationship with Country.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples belong to the world’s oldest continuing living cultures, maintaining an unbroken connection to this land for more than 65,000 years. Just stop and think about that for a moment. Sixty-five thousand years of watching the same skies, walking the same ridgelines, listening to the same birds and noticing the same changing seasons.

Over that extraordinary span of time, hundreds of different Aboriginal nations came to know the birds of their own Country intimately. They didn’t all tell the same stories or attach the same meanings to the same birds. Every nation developed its own knowledge, traditions and understanding of the land it called home. But they all shared something many of us have forgotten.

They paid attention.

Imagine walking through the bush with an Aboriginal Elder.

A magpie lands a few metres ahead of you.

You smile and say, “There’s a magpie.”

The Elder sees something entirely different. They recognise the bird immediately. They know its habits, the season, the stories that belong to that place and the generations of knowledge connected to it. To you, it’s simply another bird. To them, it belongs to a much bigger story.

That doesn’t mean every bird is a supernatural message. It means they’ve learned to see what most of us never notice. After tens of thousands of years of living with the land rather than simply on it, the birds are no longer background noise. They are part of the conversation between people and Country.

For too long we’ve dismissed much of that wisdom as little more than tribal superstition. They have much to teach us!

But instead, we’ve become astonishingly good at noticing the things that don’t really matter. We notice every notification, every vibration in our pocket, and every breaking news alert. We know exactly how many unread emails are sitting in our inbox yet couldn’t tell you the name of the bird that wakes us most mornings.

We’ve trained ourselves to pay attention to the urgent while becoming strangely blind to the ordinary.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus’ words have started to sound so different to me.

When he said, “Look at the birds,” I don’t think he was merely asking his listeners to admire wildlife. I think he was inviting them to recover a way of seeing. To slow down. To pay attention. To recognise that God has been teaching us through the ordinary all along.

So… Are You Saying Every Bird Is a Message From God?

At this point, I can almost hear some of you shouting at your screen. “Hang on, Dan. Are you seriously saying that every time a bird flies past my window, God is trying to speak to me?”

No. At least, not in the way we usually mean it.

I don’t think God has recruited the local bird population into some kind of celestial postal service. I don’t think every magpie is carrying a coded message, every ibis is warning me about my future, or every cockatoo is trying to reveal God’s will for my career. If that’s what you’re hearing me say, then I’ve done a poor job explaining myself.

What strikes me is that Jesus never asked anyone to interpret birds. He never encouraged his disciples to decode them or assign hidden meanings to their behaviour. Instead, he gave them a surprisingly simple instruction: “Look at the birds.”

I’ve read that sentence hundreds of times, but only recently have I realised how odd it really is. Why would the Son of God, in the middle of the greatest sermon ever preached, interrupt himself to tell anxious people to stop and look at birds? He could have launched into an explanation about God’s sovereignty or providence. He could have unpacked a profound theological argument. Instead, he pointed into the sky.

Perhaps We’ve Been Looking the Wrong Way

I still don’t know whether God had anything to do with the kookaburra outside my office or the seven kookaburras that gathered in the tree during that retreat. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. The older I get, the less interested I am in forcing certainty onto things I simply can’t know.

What I do know is that those moments made me stop. They interrupted the endless stream of thoughts running through my head. They drew my attention away from whatever I thought was so important and back towards the world in front of me. In that sense, they did exactly what Jesus invited his disciples to do two thousand years ago.

“Look at the birds.”

I’ve always assumed Jesus was about to make a point about birds. I’m no longer convinced that’s what he was doing. I think he was making a point about us.

We’ve forgotten how to look.

We move through the world with our heads down, eyes fixed on phones, calendars, inboxes and deadlines, while an entire creation quietly carries on around us. We ask God for signs, all the while living as though the world itself has nothing left to teach us.

Maybe that’s why Jesus didn’t begin with a complicated doctrine or an abstract theological idea. He simply pointed upwards.

Tomorrow morning, before you ask God for a sign, try something Jesus suggested instead.

Look up.