Mother's Day 2013
My dad asked me to copy this for him ....I thought it was a great thought for Mother's Day....and for all that support others......
The eagle starts off as a very scrawny, buggy-eyed little creature, and grows to be a magnificent bird with a wing span of up to 71/2 feet. Its talons are four times stronger than a human hand. It can weigh up to 11 kilograms and reach speeds of up to 120 kilometres per hour. It can fly 50 to 100 miles a day in search of food and can spot its prey over a kilometre away, though some say three kilometres. It can fly higher into the heavens than any other bird and live for 70 to 120 years. It is a majestic bird, king of the air.
How does a little eagle morph into such an amazing creature? How does the parent eagle give roots and wings to the baby eaglet? It begins at birth. When the baby eagle is born in the shell, it has to peck its way out. The mother can hear it and see a little beak poking through, but it can take three days for the eaglet to peck its way out into the world. During that time, the mother does nothing to help, and this is the first test for both mom and her baby. If the mother helped her baby come into the world, it would not have the strength or will to thrive, much less survive.
The baby arrives and finds itself in a massive nest, which can be as large as three feet deep and eight feet across. It’s lost in the nest and can’t see over the top. That’s when the mother gives her little eaglet roots and muscles in its wings and stability, routine, nourishment; all the things you pour into a child when they are little. The parent disciplines the child and prunes their roots, but she never clips their wings. The wing muscles have to develop, and despite the fact that eagles are the most competent fliers among the entire bird kingdom, they do not instinctively know how to fly. They have to be taught, and they learn by watching its parents soaring in the sky, and sees them swooping down for food and bringing it home.
Eagles find their prey, which is always fresh meat, and they place it in the nest a little distance from their baby. The little eaglet strengthens its legs to get to the food and then learns how to tear off little bite-size pieces. As the baby eats, remarkably, the mother sits on the edge of the nest and flaps her wings. The baby copies the mother, and flaps its wings while eating. The mother hovers above the nest and creates a down draft, which lifts the little chick off its feet and amazingly, it finds itself flying for a moment in the nest, then drops back down. It’s adventurous and fun. The baby hardly realizes it has flown, but from the moment it’s born, the mother is teaching it to be independent. The little eaglet has cracked its own way into the world, is strengthening its legs, tearing its own meat, testing its wings and the mother is hovering.
Then for long stretches of time, the mother will leave her baby alone. Every baby and child needs to have time in a place where the mother is not. Parenting is not about holding on so tightly to your children for as long as you can, but about gradually letting them go so they’ll be able to fly on their own. Letting go is against our instincts. All we want is to protect our children, but there is the danger of overprotecting. There are moms who hover over their children’s lives even into adulthood. They’re called ‘helicopter moms’. Today cell phones, facebook, texting are a means of keeping constant control of our children and not really letting them go. Our children need to be allowed to make their own mistakes and learn there are consequences for wrong choices, which then equips and prepares them to deal with whatever happens when they do leave the nest.
The amazing thing that eagles do to teach their babies to fly is to simply stop feeding them. The baby sits in the nest and sees mom and dad soaring in the air with dinner in their mouths. But dinner flies by and circles around while the baby screams, “Feed me! Feed me!” But they don’t get fed. Not only do they not get fed, but the mother makes the nest an uncomfortable place to live in. She stirs it up, getting rid of all the warm feathers she’s plucked off her own chest to line the nest. All the grass goes, the soft hay and all the toys that apparently eagles bring back. Everything goes. No food, no comfort, no toys and the baby is on its way out.
God did the same with the children of Israel. Deuteronomy 32:11 says, “…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, the LORD alone led him…” God sent plagues to Egypt so His people would want to leave, and He could guide them, provide for them and teach them dependence on Him. Sometimes we can make our homes so comfortable our children don’t want to leave. Like God, we need to stir up the nest for the good of our children, so they’ll learn to fly with dependence on God. God wants us to discover that underneath are His wings, His everlasting arms, which is where their security lies, not in their homes, jobs, bank accounts or even in mom and dad. God brought His children out of Egypt to carry them to Himself. But they didn’t trust Him or come to Him, so they never learned to fly, but wandered the desert for forty years.
The baby eagle watches its parents fly until the moment the nest is no longer comfortable and the unthinkable happens. The mother pushes the baby out, and panicking, it starts to hurdle to the ground, seemingly plummeting to its death, but the parents have been hovering above and swoop down, lifting the bird and carrying it on its wings. They’ll do that over and over again until the little eagle gets more and more confident. Then the mother eagle does a beautiful thing. When it’s time, she comes alongside it and they stretch their wings tip to tip, supporting her child. This pattern is repeated until the baby eagle realizes the wind is holding it up and it can fly!
There is a difference between flying and soaring, and eagles soar. The only time they flap their wings is to guide their direction. They’ll wait on the edge of a rock, sometimes for hours, until they sense the uplift of warm air. Then they launch themselves off and are lifted higher than any other bird with no effort of their own. There is nothing more glorious than seeing an eagle effortlessly soaring on the wings of the wind, being all they were created to be.
If we insist on continually propping our children up, and making them comfortable, they’ll never discover the wind of the Spirit can hold them. Isaiah 40:31 says, “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 faint.” Filled with the Spirit, we are born to soar, and our children won’t discover that until they have nothing apart from God, and they launch off the rock and find the wind. The challenge is in learning to wait on the Lord until we catch the wind of His Spirit. Eagle believers are those who seek to find out where God is and then launch into what God is already doing.
Jesus said in John 5:19, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees the Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son does also.” Jesus is caught up in the updraft of what God is already doing, and when the time comes our children need to do the same. Once we have given them roots and the wings to fly, we need to get out of their way so they can discover for themselves in dependence upon God how they can soar in the power of the wings of the Spirit. http://www.livingtruthus.com/default.asp
