Soaring

In the book of Deuteronomy, God’s relationship with his people is compared to that, ‘...like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.’

It’s a verse that is both challenging and comforting. What does Moses mean when he says that God is, ‘Like an eagle that stirs up its nest...’?

When the eagle makes her nest the uncomfortable layer of branches, thorns and sharp stones at the base are cushioned by a layer of fur and feathers from her prey. This is very much appreciated by the young eaglet but, in time, becomes a comfort zone making it much harder to persuade the bird to leave the nest and fly! So the eagle stirs up the nest, ripping out this comfortable base and exposing the material beneath to encourage the eaglet to vacate the nest!

I’ve asked a number of people this past week the reasons why they have ‘remained in the comfort zone’ rather than stepping out in order to live life to its utmost. The most popular answer has been fear of the unknown: “What if I step out and then fall flat on my face?” Fear of change was another answer. It was Mark Twain who said that the only person who likes change is a wet baby! Then there was, lack of confidence, laziness, and the 'affluenza' which so often dulls our appetite for life.

What keeps you in your comfort zone? Think about that for a few moments, and then ponder these words of John Ortberg:

‘This is a way that leads to stagnation – unrealised potential, unfilled longings. It leads to a sense that I’m not living my life; the one I was supposed to live. It leads to boredom, to what Gregg Levoy calls the common cold of the soul.
To sinful patterns of behaviour that never get confronted and changed,
Abilities and gifts that never get cultivated and deployed –
Until weeks become months
And months turn into years,
And one day you’re looking back on a life of
Deep intimate gut-wrenchingly honest conversations you never had;
Great bold prayers you never prayed,
Exhilarating risks you never took,
Sacrificial gifts you never offered
Lives you never touched,
And you’re sitting in a recliner with a shrivelled soul,
And forgotten dreams,
And you realise there was a world of desperate need,
And a great God calling you to be a part of something bigger than yourself –
You see the person you could have become but did not;
You never followed your calling.
You never got out of the boat.’

Or, in the context of our passage here, you never got out of the nest!

Maybe God’s stirring up the nest of our soul, challenging us to step out and soar with him. We can have the confidence that he will be with us and will watch over us even if he has to give us a bit of a push, and then catch us if we find ourselves falling: ‘...like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.’

There are a number of adaptations of a legend of an Indian brave in America who took an eagle’s egg and placed it into the nest of a prairie chicken. The eaglet thought that it was a prairie chicken and spent its life searching the ground for seeds and insects. One day, now fully-grown, he looked up and saw a majestic eagle soaring effortlessly on the air currents high above. “What bird is that?” he asked, to which one of the prairie chickens replied, “That’s an eagle, the king of the birds, but you could never be like him,” and so the eagle continued to search for bugs!

What conditions us? Do you want to be scratching about in the dirt with the chickens, or soaring with the eagles?

The prophet, Isaiah, writes:

‘Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.’

Stanley Jones wrote about the behaviour of an eagle he witnessed in the Himalayas as a storm approached: "I expected it to head to the earth to escape the fury of the elements. Instead the eagle set its wings in such a way that when the storm struck it rose above and cleared the storm. It used the strong winds to go higher."

Eagles are made to fly….and to fly high! And God calls us not to live mediocre lives, but meaningful passionate lives given in adventurous service to him.

As the old Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, expressed it, ‘Brother, your failure, if you fail, will begin in your faith. The air says to the eagle, “Trust me; spread thy broad wings; I will bear thee up to the sun. Only trust me. Take thy foot from off yon rock which thou canst feel beneath thee. Get away from it, and be buoyed up by the unseen element.” My brethren, eaglets of heaven, mount aloft, for God invites you. Mount! You have but to trust him.’