Fitting Me To Fly

Fitting Me to Fly

Perhaps since Adam saw the first bird soar, we have wondered what it might be like to fly. Leonardo sketched hundreds of fantastical machines that might lift a man heavenward, but nothing his complex mind could conjure ever flew. The dynamics of flight—evidenced in the ease of everyday sparrows and finches—are more easily imagined than imitated.

There’s a retreat center I love where opportunities to observe flight abound. From everyday canyon birds—sparrow, titmouse, robin, and mockingbird—to the occasional owl or hawk or fiery cardinal, the air of the place flutters and snaps with able wings.

On one visit, in a third of the time it took the God of the universe to make everything that is, I crafted a gross approximation of . . . a single feather. Coached by a patient, self-taught artist, I chose a rough tongue of tupelo wood and kept sanding more and more of it away, following the pencil marks he’d sketched. Lower here. Higher here. Thinner. And thinner. Still thinner? Yes.

When the sanding had left a soft layer of dust over my jeans and hands and under my fingernails, a feather did emerge. “You’re ready to burn,” my teacher said. I liked the sound of that. I’m a city girl and don’t often play with smoking tools.

Again, following his marks, I cut and burned groove after thin groove into the smooth wood, working from the shaft outward. Then I primed and painted and repainted my single feather until a fast-flying owl at two hundred feet might be momentarily fooled that he’d lost a part of himself. (Maybe.)

In all that shaping and burning and coloring, I imagined the patient, loving work God does in me. Not content to let me plod along in grim duty or determined obedience, he means to let me lose myself in grace and truly soar. I’m made for more than a tight punch list of dos and don’ts. He’s carving and smoothing my clumsy soul for the wind of the Spirit to ripple through and give me lift where I was once leaden.

With every nick and brush and burn, my still-creating Father is at work, fitting me to fly.

We who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith the righteousness God has promised to us.

Galatians 5:5