A bald eagle soars over the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, Montana
Shortly before we left on our recent cross-country adventure, we were talking with a friend about the upcoming trip. “Send me a picture of an eagle!” she said.
I’ll admit, my eyebrows went up. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to send her a photo of an eagle; it was just that my faith was very low. It’s fairly infrequent that I see eagles, and even when I do, it’s along a highway and there’s no chance to pull out a camera before we’re long past the bird. My experience told me that there was a very low chance of getting a picture of an eagle.
One of the few bald eagles I’ve seen: eating salmon on Ruby Beach in Olympic National Park
But it was such an odd request that I asked God to allow us to get a picture of an eagle. It would be so simple for God to put an eagle in our path, so to speak.
You see, when our faith is low, we can still have enough faith to pray. We know it’s beyond us, but we can still have faith that it’s not beyond God.
We happily went off on our trip. We saw hawks and turkey vultures, but no eagles – at least, no eagles to my non-ornithologist mind.
A hawk in the wilds of Lava Beds, California
But the request for a picture of an eagle was still with me. I couldn’t shake the verse, “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:30-31). It was like we were living there, running and not growing (too) weary, walking and not fainting.
Late one afternoon, I was jogging up a dirt road to the trailhead after the road had defied our 2-wheel-drive van. Up above me, I saw a bird soaring through the sky. I couldn’t tell what it was against the bright sun, but I pulled out my camera. “It might be an eagle,” I thought. “Digital is cheap. And if it is an eagle, I might not get another chance, so I’d better not squander this one.” So I took a few photos of the bird-in-the-sky, whatever it was.
The bald eagle over the Cabinet Mountains
I didn’t get a chance to look at my photos for another week, but when I did, it turned out not only to be an eagle but very likely a bald eagle, the most iconic eagle in the US. I was a little excited to send it off to my friend.
The very last hike we took was Leigh Lake in Grand Teton National Park. It seemed like an easy and beautiful hike, which it was. But more interesting to me was the mountain peak at the far end of our range of vision – a mountain called “Eagle’s Rest Peak”. It was so fitting. After a trip of soaring like eagles, we were looking at Eagle’s Rest.
A bald eagle roosting in a tree near Ruby Beach, Washington
I love it when God does that – speaks to us through our friend, gives us His word, and fulfills what He has said. My eagle pictures aren’t great, but it is the eagle I had so little faith in seeing.
