Handicapped Bird

Yesterday evening I was stopped at an intersection while I waited for the light to change. I looked over to my left, and there was this little bird hopping around on the median. As it was pecking at the pavement, it seemed like a pretty ordinary bird. Nothing unusual or strange. In fact, if I hadn't looked closer, I would have missed an important detail about this bird. I leaned closer to my window to see if my eyes were just deceiving me, but sure enough, the bird only had one leg! 

I sat there, just marveling at this little bird. It only stayed for a few more seconds after I realized its handicap, before bending that solitary leg and flying away, off to its next destination. 

Maybe I'm weird that I notice things like that, but I was so intrigued by this little bird with only one leg. After it flew off, I wondered how it could have lost its other leg. Fell out of a tree, maybe? Victim to a predator higher in the food chain? Hit by a car, recovered miraculously and only suffered the loss of a leg? One can only guess.

And then I thought about something else. However this bird lost its leg, it still adapted. Not just adapted, it flew, doing just what a bird was made to do. Maybe few of us have ever lost a body part, but many of us have lost money, jobs, grades, loved ones, friends, relationships, status, popularity, etc. If we have a deep love for our Savior, then somehow, those things do not destroy us. We cry out to God, time goes by, and we find that we have adapted. Somehow, the brokenness did not bring defeat.

My friends, like the bird that lost something it likely considered so important before, we must not despair when life does not go as we want it to. Especially when God chooses a situation for us that He chose for no one else, no matter how bleak. His will above all else, your purpose remains.

Whatever your pain, whatever your sorrow, however exhausted you are from things never going "right", WAIT upon the Lord. And may you look back years down the road and find that all along, He was with you. May you find that your situation did not keep you grounded, but like the handicapped bird, you soared high above it. Oh, He may not take away your situation, like He did not grow for the bird a new leg. But the bird still soared. It was not destroyed.

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for 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 40:31