Bald Eagles

This past week I had an experience most will never have in a lifetime. As I was walking into my front yard I heard some rustling in the bushes and out of the corner of my eye I saw what I thought was a giant cat. I looked again and to my dismay it was a full grown bald eagle, not 10 feet away. He (or she) was injured due to what looked like a fight of some sort. Its wing was broken in half and he/she was stranded to the ground. It wasn't long after that my neighbor arrived home and we stood on the sidewalk starring at this bird, dumbfounded over what to do. After making a number of phone calls we finally got a hold of somebody from the autobahn society and they quickly sent out a team to capture this magnificent creature. 

To see a bald eagle in ones front yard is so foreign because it is so out of place. An eagle is supposed to soar high above everyone and everything. They are a magnificent bird which loses much of its splendor when its ability to fly is taken away. The same is true for the church. In the book of Isaiah we read that those who wait on the Lord will rise and soar like the eagles. As Christians we ought to be flying high above this world. We should have a magnificence that comes from Christ who makes us fly. All too often though, we find ourselves stuck on the ground with broken wings. 

I am reminded of a song that is titled "Shout to the North"

Verse three talks about our redemption:

"Rise up Church with broken wings

Fill this place with songs again

Of our God who reigns on high

By his grace again we'll fly"

With much work and some time I am sure this bald eagle will one day be able to soar again. When we, as humans, find ourselves broken and unable to fly, with some work and a little bit of time and a lot of grace, we will once again find ourselves soaring high above this earth. The God who created you and me reigns above all. And it is through his grace and his strength that we are able to fly higher than ever before.

Awe and Wonder

Late in life, Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography: "I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds...gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare...I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now, for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost any taste for pictures or music...I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight that it formerly did...My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts..."
(an excerpt from a Christianity Today article by Virginia Stem Owens)

God has placed inside all of us a sense of wonder and awe. However, it seems the older we get, the more our lives are exposed to, we begin to lose that wonder. Charles Darwin tried to explain everything by pure natural science and in the process he lost something, his sense of wonder. He no longer could enjoy that "exquisite delight" that nature once brought him. Children are full of wonder. Their favorite question is "why". Everything is new to them. As we grow older we attempt to answer all the why questions. We fill our minds with general laws and large collections of facts and we fail to see the mystery in everyday life. 

I am not advocating ignorance. I feel often people are just too stubborn to admit reality and face up to the facts, but I am advocating a new sense of awe and wonder. We can have assurance in the unknown. When we walk outside, we don't always need to know where rain comes from, or where the clouds go on a sunny day, or why the grass is green, or why grandpa has lost all his hair. We can just imagine, and say "Wow! That really is something. I wonder..." 

Bamboo and Basements

Being a home owner has its advantages but let me tell you it also has its problems. When I bought our house two years ago the backyard was like a jungle. There were two clumps of bamboo. They were pretty big and in inconvenient locations so I decided to cut them down. The bamboo didn’t like that idea and came back rather quickly with a vengeance. So I tried to kill it. I cut it all down again and then over fertilized the back yard and covered it with clear plastic. This was supposed to completely burn t out. This was a sure way to get rid of the stuff. It worked! So I thought. It looked like all the bamboo had died and I wasn’t going to have a problem tilling up the backyard to plant a new yard. Well, about a month ago it decided to start coming back. And it is everywhere again.

Another frustrating thing that happened recently was my basement flooding. This past winter we had some heavy snowfall and when it started melting water got into places that it had never gotten into before. One of those places was my basement. I went outside and the water was puddling up right at the downspout at the corner of the house. I was sure this was the problem. I piped the water into the yard and then started mopping up the mess downstairs. Well, just a week or two ago it happened again. I ran outside to see if I could see where the water was coming from and I saw 4 inches of standing water in my window well. The water was just pouring down this thing from all directions of my yard. I quickly moved some dirt around to fix the problem but the damage had already happened.

I started thinking about our spiritual lives and how much they are like owning a home. We work and work and work on our lives fixing problems here and there. But how many times have you felt like you fixed something in your life just to find out that you were wrong. Just when you thought you had conquered that temptation in your life something came up and you fell. When it came to my bamboo and basement I thought I had eliminated the problem. It didn’t take a real long time to discover that the problem was a lot deeper than I first had realized it. If I want to get rid of my bamboo I need to go deeper than I have gone before and if I want to prevent water from filling up my basement again I am going to need to do some irrigation.

We see the easy road and think that it is going to work. It is the quick fix. Matthew 7:13 tells us to enter through the narrow gate because wide is the gate that leads to destruction and many go through it. We look for the wide gate, the easy fix. We try to fix things ourselves and in frank honesty we suck at it. We are having to fix the same things over and over and over again. We are living in bondage. There is no freedom in that.

This past week in Sunday School we talked about the spiritual discipline of confession. What a lively discussion we had. If you want to see change in your life, if you want to see problems you battle with day in and day out disappear, than tell somebody. There is a great freedom and release when you share your burden with another. When fixing things on my house I have always counseled with my father. He is a mind full of wisdom when it comes to solving problems related to houses. He always has an answer, and if he doesn’t it doesn’t take him long to figure it out. At times, if my problem is too great, he will also come along side me and help me fix it. With his help I am able to get to the root f the problem and fix it for good. The same is true when it comes to confessing our sins to one another. We are able to seek counsel from others who have dealt with the same thing. And then they are able to some alongside of us and help us along the way.