A Reverse Metaphor

It’s February and I saw Eagle today. He was roosting like a half-frozen buzzard on the top of a huge spruce tree down by the lake. He had a hungry look about him. I expect calving time was heavy on his mind. Soon he would be cleaning up the calving grounds along with the ravens, crows and other carrion eaters.

It took me back to last July. Linda and I were desperate for holidays then. When they finally arrived, the first thing we had to do was repair our travel trailer. I was expecting a couple of days of work but when we got into it, dry rot in the floor and walls necessitated a major complex overhaul. The trailer was parked directly in the hot July sun and I had not been feeling well for about a month or so. The size of the task, the heat of the sun and the condition of my belly beleaguered me.

About the second day, when it became obvious that my two-day job was going to waste at least two weeks of desperately needed holiday rest, I was taking my lunch, such as it was, sprawled on the deck overlooking the lake. Sick, tired and overwhelmed, I was crying out to God. That’s when Eagle lifted off of his roost on a majestic Douglas Fir across the lake. Slowly beating his wings, he flew low over the water directly towards our place. At the last minute he adjusted his flaps slightly and gained just enough elevation to clear the roof of our house. He was so close to me when he flapped overhead that I could hear his feathers squeak.

I have been learning in my past 32 years of faith to never take an encounter with nature for granted. Like my biblical namesake, I have learned that the heavens declare God (Psalm19:1). But I have also learned to drag every encounter with nature through the word of God, for what nature has to declare is best received as illustration for the revealing word of God in scripture. And so it was that a nice bit of scripture got all tangled up in my desperate prayer and I began to mutter: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31). And looking up, I think I finally got it; what it means to fly on eagles’ wings.

Sprawled exhausted on our deck, it seemed to me that in some strange way I had something in common with those returning exiles that Isaiah spoke his word of God to. They too must have been sick, tired and disgusted as they faced the desert heat and what seemed like an impossibly long way back home. The truth of the matter was they were going to have to walk; not run, not fly, but walk through some of the worst desert and mountainous ground in the world as they trudged from Babylon back to Jerusalem. Running and not being weary and mounting up with eagles’ wings must have seemed to be a cruel joke.

But when Eagle passed over me on the deck and I muttered Isaiah’s most famous text out loud, I realized that what Isaiah said was not just a cruel metaphor that promised an eagle’s flight and tireless running to the weary and discouraged. What he said was really all about walking back to Jerusalem, about trudging the whole way and how you get it done. The real promise of God in the text is walking and eventually getting there. But how does that happen?

It seemed to me as I sprawled exhausted on the deck that the two key words I muttered in response to Eagle’s flyby were the words “wait” and “faint.” In my mind, waiting on the Lord had to do with faith and walking and not fainting had to do with persistence.

Which brought me to the one thing it seems the person of faith is called on to do: to persistently take the next step in faith, to do the next thing. That is all the person of God in Babylon was required to do—to take the next step towards Jerusalem in persistent faith, to walk and not faint one step at a time, to relentlessly do the next thing in faith and to leave the arriving in Jerusalem up to God. Whatever the nature of my Babylon, my current hell on wheels, it must be that this was all I was expected to do. To take the next step, do the next thing, leave the arriving to God.

And so that’s what I did. I broke each task in trailer repair into steps and I just focused on taking the next one. For two long weeks of long hot days I just did the next thing. And as I did that, what I experienced was a remarkable empowering shift in perspective. It was in keeping with the shift in perspective in Isaiah 40:31.

There appears to be a really interesting reverse order. Isaiah says, “But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Isaiah’s people lived that out in reverse. I lived that out in reverse. I took the next step. I persistently did the next thing with faith and as I did, my perspective shifted. Soon it seemed the task was doable, one step at a time. Amazingly the process became like being borne on eagles’ wings as my perspective changed. And when you are really up against it, perspective seems to be just about everything.

Over and over in scripture I see this reversing of metaphor and shift in perspective. Listen to how this shift of perspective is spoken of in Exodus about the impossible escape from Egypt: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exodus 19:4). Listen to how this shift of perspective is spoken of in Deuteronomy concerning Israel’s slow 40-year slog through the wilderness of Sinai: “He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of a wilderness; He encircled him, He cared for him, He guarded him as the pupil of His eye. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that hovers over its young, He spread His wings and caught them, He carried them on His pinions” (Deuteronomy 32:10-12).