On Eagle's Wings

On one of our trips to the lake, my son and I had the privilege to observe what looked to us as a family of eagles, mom and dad and two eaglets, in flight. Most likely flight school time, we thought, as we marveled at the magnificence of these masters of the winds. They glide so effortlessly while we grumbled under our breaths below as the westerly breeze obliterated our best attempts at landing our fish baits in our favorite holes.

The birds circled about for awhile. Then the largest one headed north and disappeared behind the trees. There goes my family theory, I thought again. Until the big bird reappeared, this time to the right of the trees and in full frontal view of us. With powerful wing beats it rose from the water, now we realized, clutching in one of its vise-like talons a huge trout, its tail still swishing back and forth. What an awesome sight!

It never ceases to amaze me whenever I see in real live presentation the instincts that God has programmed into creatures like the birds. When they have their young, they care for them, guard them with their lives, feed them selflessly and teach them what they need to learn in order to survive on their own.

The mother eagle even pads her nest with feathers from her own breast to make it comfortable for her eaglets. Yet, she will also tweak the twigs on the same nest at the proper time, making it less and less hospitable, to force the growing young out of it. She will take one of the juveniles, fly high and drop it. She lets it fall on a free dive all by itself. Then she quickly flies underneath it, catches it in one powerful wing, and does it all over again until the young one learns to fly on its own.

What a powerful picture of how God also mentors every believer into the shape he has designed each one of us to be. No matter what the new believer's age is when he first receives Christ as his personal Savior and LORD, he is an infant in Christ at that point. He will need to feed on spiritual milk, the Word of God. He will take his first baby steps of faith, learn to speak God's language, go into deeper study of God's Word and bolder petitions in prayer, and "fly," if you will, in worship and in committing to a life of ministry for Christ.

I remember just how warm and fuzzy it was when I was a baby in the faith. All the cares in the world seemed to have melted out of my life. But at each step of faith, I saw more and more that the "harvest was plentiful but the workers are few" (Matthew 9:37). Each time I responded to a harvest need I needed to grow up some more to be equal to the task. Every stage in my growth was not without pain nor trouble.

The Father in heaven, just like the mother eagle, "tweaks the twigs" in our comfort zone, throws us into a free fall where we often times feel we are so alone, and then at the appropriate time, never too soon and never too late, he catches us. Those are the times when we think that a miracle has just happened and all our troubles have somehow worked themselves out, vanished into thin air almost. Then we get thrown into another free fall. Only this time we find that we have better use of our "wings" from having gone through the last involuntary dive.

Until we are flying skillfully, the Father never leaves us on our own. He never really does even when we have fully grown. Christ is perfect. And the Father is working so that we will grow, be shaped and conformed, into Christ's likeness.

The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. (Deuteronomy 33:27)

Artwork provided courtesy of James "theo" Theopistos. See his artwork at BibleVerseArt.com, which is owned and operated by Omni Visions Digital Media Services.