Our Youth Pastor told this story:
While out for a walk, a farmer in British Columbia found a very young Eagle on the ground. Having obviously fallen out of its nest, the bird had one leg and a wing that seemed to be broken. The farmer took the small bird home and nursed it back to health in part, by allowing it to live among his chickens. The oddest thing happened. As the Eagle grew in size, it seemed to think it was a chicken. Of course the farmer fed it gophers and mice, but other than that, the Eagle walked around with the chickens, sometimes even scratching in the dirt like them. The strangest thing however was that the Eagle refused to fly. Mimicking his chicken friends as they flapped their wings, the Eagle would flap his wings to the point of leaving the ground but he never would he fly away.
News of this bird made its way to a biologist who lived in the area. He asked the farmer if he might work with the bird and see if he could get it to fly. As the farmer never intended for the Eagle to remain earth-bound, the he said, “Sure.”
First the biologist held the bird as high as his arms would reached. With a lifting motion he tried to “boost” the Eagle into the air. The Eagle did spread its wings and jump, but only enough to allow it to glide to the ground with the rest of the chickens. Next the biologist took the bird to the top of the chicken coop, with the same result. Finally, after several days of encouraging the bird to fly, the biologist took the bird to the top of the farmer’s house. As he repeatedly threw his arms up in the air, the most he could get the Eagle to do was spread its wings for balance while clamping its talons firmly to the gloved hand. Just as he was about to give up, the man raised his tired arms one last time in the air and to his great joy and surprise, the Eagle took off, flew high above the pines and never returned to the farm yard.
No one knows if the Eagle survived or not. Having never been trained to hunt, perhaps not. The point of the story, however, is this. We Christians were meant to sore. We were never meant to be earth bound. We were meant to glide into and through life upon the wings of the greatest Love in the Universe. This is not true for everyone. Those who “live upon the earth,” like chickens, scratching and clawing for the crumbs that this life has to offer are as happy as they’re ever going to get.
We don’t need to settle for less. Because of Jesus, there is so much more to life than scratching for crumbs! As N. T. Wright says, “Love is not a duty. Love is our destiny.”
You are part of God’s Kingdom and that Kingdom, while incomplete at present, starts right now. Live like you know it!
“Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They will rise up on wings like Eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.”
Isaiah 40:31
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting story. Ironically however, I think it applies even more the other way around.
ReplyDeleteSince most people are raised by parents who believe in God, and most people still believe in God, the odd ones, the Eagles, are actually the minority that looks around and realizes that by flying you can see much farther, and that you can make sense of much more of this fragile life that we have.
Once you learn to fly, you also realize that there are not only chicken, but sheeps, goats, cows... all waiting for their mighty butcher to come and end their meaningless life, in the hope that something better awaits them, on the "other side".
Ah, yes. Like every other 12-year-old, Hugo knows that doing the opposite of what your parents say is the essence of freedom and happiness.
ReplyDeleteLike most child below 8, Thesauros is not able to build his own ideas from what he reads.
ReplyDeleteLike most fundamentalist Christians, Thesauros thinks that non-believers are only rebelling.
Like no other people that I know, Thesauros shows once more that his cognitive dissonance does not allow him to understand how others think.
Just to make it clear for your slow mind, I am all in favor of following parents' authority and advices. In fact, I know fully well that there are a few things that I could improve in my life style right now if I were to live more like them... nothing to do with religion though.
You understand that or I need to explain it in even more details?
So the metaphor of learning to fly in your first comment only applies if your parents were teaching you about God?
ReplyDeleteAnd what do you suppose believing in God would get a person, Hugo - if God should exist, that is? Have you never read Matthew 7:21-23?
You sound like the Gun Toting Atheists who thinks that if you’ve been civically minded during your life on earth, like the great Gandhi, then God would be a fool to not let you in to heaven - if God existed, that is.
Yes Rod, you seem to forget, as usual, that I was raised CATHOLIC. We had religious studies in school until secondary 3rd.
ReplyDeleteI only need to go to 'www.info-bible.org' to read the passages you quote and everything comes back to mind quickly!
Unfortunately, even if Jesus' sermon on the mount can be inspiring, you need to use your own reason and logic to get the most out of it. Because in the end, Jesus was nothing more than another prophet talking about what he thinks was right.
So the metaphor of learning to fly does not apply only to teachings about God, it can apply to a bunch of things. It's YOU, and other Christians, who like to use it to show how your beliefs make you so special, as if being an eagle was a symbol for being a born again Christian, somebody who has a healed and personal relationship with Jesus.
The problem is that you are completely mistaken. Your mindset is anything but special. You feel special in your own mind because of your own interpretation of Jesus teaching and the comforting idea that it will yield you with eternal bliss after death, but the reality is that you have no clue; at least not more than anybody else.
Let me rephrase that, again, so that you might perhaps understand. YOU, Rod, are NOT special. You have this idea of God in your head, and you share it with a bunch of people, but in the end there is nothing special about it. You are just a random Christian who is most likely wrong about anything labelled "spiritual".
How convinced am I of that? 99.9% I would say. Why? simply because of the principle that all of you religious "nuts" cannot be all right, but you could possible be all wrong. And it would make so much more sense, as ALL your religious faith contradict, in one way or the other, the real world we live in.
That's what the story reminds me of. ALL of you are sheep, cows, goats... who think that there is a God, that there is an afterlife. However, us Eagles, who disbelieve all that, try to make sense of all that while being a struggling minority.