Sermon by Hilary
Price - May 2012
Soaring like Eagles.
So this morning we
are going to look at how a parent gives a child roots and wings and how God
gives His children roots and wings. And we are going to consider what the Bible
calls a mystery. Proverbs 30:18-19 the writer says, “There are three things too
amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way
of a man with a young woman.” And we are just going to look at one of those –
we are going to look at the way of an eagle in the sky. And we are going to
learn amazing lessons from the bird that is called the king of the air. It is a
remarkable bird. Jesus said, “Look at
the birds.” He often told us to look at the picture book around us to learn
lessons from what we see. So today the eagle will be our teacher. The eagle
starts off as a very scrawny buggley eyed little creature. And somehow it grows
to be a majestic bird with a wing span of up to 7 ½ feet. It has talons that
are four times stronger than a human hand. It can weigh up to 11 kg. It can
reach speeds of up to 120 km. /hour. It can fly 50-100 miles a day in search of
food. It can spot its prey over a kilometre away – some say 3 kilometres. It
can fly higher up into the heavens than any other bird and it can live for
70-120 years. It is a majestic bird.
So how does this
little eagle morph into this amazing creature? How does the parent eagle give
roots and wings to the baby eaglet? Actually it begins at birth. When the baby
eagle is born in the shell, it has to peck its way out of the shell. So the
mother can hear it, she can see the little beak coming. It can take three days for
it to peck its way into the world. And in that time the
mother does not help. I know as moms you will be thinking how hard that must
be. You just want to go and just help and then the baby could get out. But this
is the first test for the mother and the baby eagle. And being a mother is all
about letting go. And in this situation you let go before the baby is even
born. If the mother pecked a hole and let the baby come out, it would not be a
baby that would survive. If it doesn’t have the strength and the will to peck
its own way out of the egg then it is not going to be a baby that will thrive.
So the baby arrives and it finds itself in a nest, a massive nest. I became a
little bit kind of obsessed with eagles when I saw a pair this summer in Nova
Scotia and discovered the nest that they had been living in. It was way up in a
tree and it was enormous; it was the biggest nest I had ever seen. They can be
three feet deep and they can be eight feet across. And so the little bird; at
first it pecks its way out of its shell, its egg, sits in this little nest and
it cannot see out. It can’t see over the top.
That’s the time to
give the little baby roots, give them muscles in its wings, stability, routine,
nourishment, all the things you pour into a child when they are very little.
And the parent disciplines the child and prunes their roots, but you don’t cut,
you don’t clip their wings; you simply prune their roots. There is a big
difference. And those wings that stretch over two metres across start off as
tiny little wings. And the wing muscles have to start developing when they are
little so when the time comes to fly they will be ready. You don’t push your
children out of the nest without helping them to develop first. And despite the
fact (this amazes me) that eagles are the most competent fliers among the whole
bird kingdom, they do not instinctively know how to fly. If the mother bird and
the father bird do not teach them, they will never lift off the ground. They
have to be taught. And what goes on between an eagle and its baby is what in
the natural world is called imprinting. In imprinting there is a bond
established between the baby and the first thing it sees. So a little duck was
born and the first thing it saw was a beach ball. So it would only go where the
beach ball rolled. And it spent its whole life trying to mate with beach balls.
So the eagle locks on to its parents. That’s the first thing that they see. And
the eagle simply learns by watching. This is a huge challenge to parents
because they see what you want them to see and they see what you don’t want
them to see. And the little baby watches the parents soaring in the sky and it
sees it swooping down for meals and bringing it home to the nest. And little by
little the parent is teaching the baby one day you will do this yourself.
So how will it get
to that place to do it? Well, here the eagle differs from other birds as well.
We have at the moment a pair of cardinals nesting in the clematis just on the
garage on my neighbor’s house. And they are busy all day, busy all day. And in
the little nest there are three little cardinals all just sitting with their
mouths open. If you put a speech bubble above them they would just be saying,
“Feed me, feed me, feed me.” And the mother flies around and she comes and she
pops the worm into the baby’s mouth. Well eagles don’t do
that. Eagles fly off. They get their prey, which is always fresh meat - eagles
never feed on dead carcasses like vultures. Vultures will gorge at a carcass
until they are sick. Eagles actually get fresh meat, they bring it back to the
nest and they don’t put it next to the baby; they put it away from the baby. So
the baby has to strengthen its legs to get to the food and then it has to learn
how to tear off little appropriate bite-size pieces so when it does leave the
nest it knows how to tear off the meat. And as the baby eats, its muscles are
gradually being strengthened, not just because it is taking in food, but
because remarkably, the mother sits on the edge of the nest while the baby is
eating and she flaps her wings. And because the baby copies the mother, while
it is eating it is flapping its wings. So it’s actually developing its wings as
well as eating the food.
I am giving you a
lot of spiritual parallels here – I am not going to put up a big light every
time I give you one because it would get tedious for you, but just ask the Lord
to show you the spiritual truths behind the physical pictures I am giving you
this morning because they are pretty remarkable. So the baby is in the nest,
the food is coming, it is taking the food, it is flapping its wings, and it continues
to grow. And then the mother starts to hover above the nest and she creates a
down draft, which lifts the little chick off its feet and it finds itself for a
moment flying in the nest and then it drops back down again. And I love this
picture because the first flight that the eagle baby takes is tiny. It hardly
realizes it has done it and it has done it within the confines of the nest.
That’s adventure and it’s fun.
And you need to have
fun and adventure in your nest, your home, or your children will go and look
for it somewhere else. If everything you do is boring, why would they want to
be in your nest? They will be wanting to be in the nest of the family down the
road who do the fun things. So incorporating fun is really, really important.
The children learn, they learn what they can do physically and what they can’t
do in their muscles, and that all goes on in the nest when they are little. So
from the moment this baby is born it is learning to be independent. It has
cracked its way into the world, it is tearing its own meat, it is testing out
its wings, the mother is hovering. But the mother leaves the bird for long
stretches of time by itself. Every baby and every child needs to have time in a
place where the mother is not. Parenting is not about holding so tightly to
your children as long as you can; it’s about gradually letting your children
go. And Alice Bradley
said, “I knew there would come a time when I have would have to say ‘goodbye’ to
my little boy. I just didn’t realize it would happen again and again.” And it
does. There’s that first time you leave your child with somebody else to
babysit. There’s that time they walk away from you into the daycare program. Depending
on what their personality is, my children all did that very differently. Hannah
had tears streaming down her face and kept waving and kept waving. And Laura
didn’t give me a backward glance and just went whisking off into daycare. But
they changed in their personalities. Hannah didn’t remain that little child who
cried when her mommy wasn’t there, but it was hard at first. And sometimes it’s
hard for you. And I have seen mothers standing at the gate bawling. “Bye
darling!” And the kid’s like, “Mom, just go.” Letting go is not natural. It’s
against all our instincts. We just want to protect but we’re in great danger of
overprotecting. And unfortunately now we have a whole breed of moms, which we
will call helicopter moms.
And this is not
healthy helicopter stuff hovering above to let the down draft lift them up.
This is very unhealthy helicopter moms. And what these moms do is they hover
over their children’s lives all the time and they have several ways of doing
it. They are invisible but they are there. Because they have a cellphone, so
they send their kid off with a cellphone. And the kid thinks, “I am on my own.”
Oh, but they are not on their own because they get to where they are going and
they are doing what they are doing, and the phone rings. And they pick it up
and, “Oh, yes, of course it is Mom.” And Mom says, “Where are you?” “Well, you
know where I am – I am at Susan’s. I said I was going to Susan’s.” “What are you
doing?” “Well we are watching the television.” “The television? What certificate
is the film you are watching?” And they are just butting in on their children’s
lives and then they start giving advice. “Are there any parents in the home?
They’re not? You can leave that room you know; if you don’t like that film you
can walk away.” And the child is actually being controlled – well, trying to be
controlled by the mom who is at a distance but still wanting to be in there,
interfering and not letting the child make their own decisions, not let them be
responsible, not make them make their own mistakes and discover there are
consequences when you make mistakes. I remember being at a friend’s house once.
I was about 13. Her parents were out. We began watching a movie. We didn’t know
it was a horror movie – it became a horror movie. To our horror, it became a
horror movie. At that moment we had a choice whether to watch or not. Well, we
were intrigued, so we started watching and watching and then this terrible
image came on the screen and I just screamed and ran out. I was running down
(she lived in this really old house with dark corridors) – we were running down
the corridor and I didn’t know that she had screamed and run with me. I was running
down the corridor and I looked behind me and she was there! We both ran away
into another room and then I said, “Go back and switch the television off” and
she said, “No, you go back. So we kind of crept
in like this and switched the television off. Now why did I do that? I didn’t
do it because my mom called me and said, “What are you watching? Are you sure
it’s decent?” I did it because my mom never brought horror movies into my home.
She brought fresh meat, good stuff. And I learned from my mom. I learned by
observing. And I never watched a horror movie again in my life. I loathe horror
movies and I learned by my own experience. I really feel sad now in the world
of technology that the offensive to spy on your children has ramped up several
notches with the world of Facebook. So now we have parents who can actually spy
into their children’s worlds. And believe me, they do.
They look at what
their children are wearing, they look at who they are hanging out with, they look
at what they are saying. And if they don’t like it, they call them up and tell
them. “I noticed you said…” We have to give our children space where the mother
is not present and trust them that what they have learned will equip them to
deal with whatever happens in that space. I don’t do Facebook. Please don’t ask
me to be your friend. I am not going to be your friend. I don’t like it
personally. I don’t want people knowing everything about my life. And when it came
out I made a decision, really because of this mother spying thing that I
loathe. And my son was a
teenager and I know it was his darkest fear that I would be able to get into
his world and see what he was doing. So I don’t do Facebook and I have this
horrible feeling that if I asked if I could be a friend, he would reject me, so
I didn’t ask if I could be his friend. The time to leave the nest will come.
It’ll come soon. But the children have got to have taken responsibility and
started making decisions for themselves and discovering “if I do a bad thing then
there will be a bad consequence and I will get hurt.” And sometimes they get
hurt and sometimes they eat bad things, but they won’t be bad things that you
have brought into the home and exposed them to. And when it is time to leave
the nest – and this is the amazing thing about eagle parents – they do two
things to encourage their babies to fly: it is so simple – they stop feeding
them. So the baby sits and sees the mom and the dad out there. We watched this
this summer circling around, a big juicy rabbit hanging out of the beak. They
watch mom and dad coming – “Oh good, dinner’s coming.”
Dinner flies past.
Dinner flies around the lake. And the baby starts to scream. So the mom comes
back again. Now Dad comes. Now he has got something bigger and juicier. And the
baby in the end is just yelling. We heard him. “Feed me!!” And they won’t and
they don’t. And not only do they not feed the baby, what they now do is they
make the nest a very uncomfortable place to live in. So they stir it all up and
all those lovely feathers that she plucked off her heart above her chest to
line the nest that is so symbolic, she clears them all out. “Okay, we are done
now. All the grass goes. All the soft hay goes. All the toys that apparently
eagles pick up anything they bring back – rattles, dolls, all kinds of things
are in the eagle’s nest. Those go out. No food, no comfort, no toys; you are on
your way. So now this little bird has a choice, and we have a choice. Parents
of Canada: I don’t know there’s any nation on earth that has so many adults
living in the basement of the parents in the homes in Canada. This is not a
problem in Britain because we don’t have basements, so that’s it. They have to
go. I wonder how many of you (I am not going to ask you to put your hands up)
have a kid over the age of about 25, they’re done university and they’re living
in the basement.
Let me just tell you
something. If you are still doing your kid’s washing and they are 26 years old
and the only time they ever come up from the basement is when they smell the
aroma of your delicious cooking and they plop themselves down at the table and
you feed them yet again, they will be there until they are 56 years old. And
the only time they will come up and stay upstairs is when you cease to be
shuffling around up there because you have shuffled off your mortal coil and
they think, “I get the house.” It’s so dangerous to
just keep your children at home and let them stay there. It’s time to encourage
them on their way. And we can do that by stirring up the nest. We take away all
the soft stuff and we leave these little pointy bits sticking up, which are
really hard to sit on. This is exactly what God did. Deuteronomy 32:11 says, “Like
an eagle that stirs up its nest” (makes it uncomfortable) “hovers over its
young” (showing them how to fly), “spreads its wings to catch them” (he pushes
them out of the nest) “and he carries them on his pinions.” So is the Lord God
with His people. God stirred up the nest of the children of Israel when they were
living in Egypt. He sent plagues, pointy, nasty things, so that they would no
longer want to live there, so they would want to leave, so they would learn to
depend on Him. So He could guide them and He could rescue them and He could
provide for them, not the masters they were living under in Egypt.
It might well be
that your children have just become far too comfortable in the nest. Nothing is expected of them. It
might well be that you have become far too comfortable in the nest. Sometimes God will
destroy our nests because we have started to put our confidence in them. I have spent years
building this house, Lord, this business Lord, this retirement plan. And now I just depend on that
instead of God being the anchor of my soul.
Source: Livng Truth.ca
