There’s a swallow’s nest built onto a rafter under our car port, just a few feet from our car. The swallows use the nest year after year, and I really enjoy watching the whole process. The swallows showing up again in the spring, and then eventually…the beaks of the little baby birds poking up above the rim of the nest. Most years, there’s three, sometimes four. The parents fuss and fly in and out as I move the car — not happy with me being so close to their vulnerable kids.
As the days pass, and the parents come and go with worms to plop into upturned beaks, the baby birds get bigger and bigger and it’s obvious that soon they are no longer going to fit in there together. Of necessity, the birds need to learn to fly.
One morning as I went out to the car, I saw one of the babies perched on the door frame a few feet from the nest. It looked a little awkward and I thought to myself, I know how that feels, “Great. I stepped out of the nest — but now what am I supposed to do?”
As I looked around, there was a second baby perched on the top of some boards propped against the wall. A third bird was still sitting in the nest.
I felt the need to encourage it. “Hey, it’s okay. You can do it. You already have all you need to take that step out of the nest and learn how to fly. It’s what you’re built for, and you are ready. You can do it!”
How’s that for a metaphor for us? Maybe it’s having to drop your kid off at preschool the first time, or at college for the first time, or watching them walk down the aisle to get married. Maybe it’s starting a new job and all the new things that challenge us there.
Maybe it’s about letting go of things: not driving any more or moving to a new place. Maybe it’s about starting a new relationship. It even works as a metaphor for dying, doesn’t it?
Our lives are filled with those moments, both major and minor, where it is necessary to step out of the nest to something new. God used those baby birds to remind me — we do not come to those big, challenging moments unequipped. God has built us to fly. Or we could say that God teaches us to fly — again and again as new challenges face us.
The Holy Spirit is there in the nest with us; there at the classroom door with us; there at the funeral home with us. The Holy Spirit knows our needs, our fears, our challenges because the Holy Spirit remains near us. And so, God knows we are sitting at the edge of the nest, scared to death to launch ourselves into the thin air of whatever comes next.
This coming Sunday we will read Romans 8:26-29 where Paul reminds us that whatever meets us as we step into the new, it will not overcome us. We are equipped by God and accompanied by God and nothing that we meet will change that —
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
All that we need, God has already provided.
+BJST