I Want to Be an Eagle, but God Has Other Plans: On Being Servants to a Higher Calling

This photo is of daddy eagle, M15, feeding mommy eagle Harriet, who has just finished sitting on the nest all night, keeping little eaglet, E9, toasty warm. I had no idea parent eagles treated each other so respectfully, so tenderly, so empathetically. I want to be an eagle. I at least want to be married to an eagle.

The eagles seem to always put each other's needs first.

Charles Spurgeon said: Grow likewise in humility. Seek to lie very low, and know more of your own nothingness.

If I made  New Year's Resolutions, which I don't, this would be one of them. In a sense, this is what the eagles have done that draws me to sit for hours upon hours watching them. Their existence, at least at this time of hatching and fledging of their young, is wholly devoted to them being nothing but servants to a higher calling.

Each time M15 returns to the nest, he brings a pine sprig, or a fish, or soft mossy bedding. Without hesitation, he settles on the nest, gathering little E9 safely under his breast. Harriet never wanders far. She is almost always on an upper limb or nearby pole, keeping watch while stretching her wings. The eagle parents never seem to squabble, or complain, or grow bitter over the load they must bear, which is all consuming. So much I have to learn from these eagles!

I have fallen so completely in love with them that I have added an eagle to my new book, the third in the Unlikely Friends series. I just started writing, so not sure where the plot will go but I am enjoying the research. The research involves sitting for hours a day watching the eagle webcam.

I did have to break from my hard work to go to PT for my frozen shoulder. My therapist announced that my range is "functional" in all planes except internal and external rotation. That means I cannot scratch an itch in the middle of my back, nor easily apply deodorant to my left underarm. It is still difficult to get my right arm in the coat sleeve.

Anyway, I won't be discharged from PT till all range is "functional." She is stepping up her game, I think. Now pretty much everything she does to me HURTS a LOT. Since the New Year has begun and our deductible now has a LONG way to go before being met, I am also paying for the privilege to be HURT a LOT.

Another reason I want to be an eagle. They don't go to PT.

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Philippians 2:3-11 

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. ...