Waiting on Wings

Waiting on Wings

Ornithologists describe how young eagles learn to fly: the parent eagle literally pushes the eaglet out of the nest, then swoops beneath to catch it. Over days, the eaglet learns to trust those winds and those wings. But before the soaring there is always the falling — and before the falling there is the terrifying moment of being pushed from safety. A bird-watcher who spent a season observing eagle nests wrote afterward: 'The eagles who soar highest are always the ones who fell the farthest first.' She connected this to her own life — the season of loss that preceded her greatest spiritual growth. Waiting on God felt like falling. Soaring came afterward, and it was real.

Isaiah 40 is written to exhausted exiles — people who had been waiting decades for God to move. Verse 27 captures their despair: 'My way is hidden from the LORD.' Into that discouragement, the prophet asks a series of rhetorical questions about God's infinite power, building to the promise of verse 31. Notice the progression: soar, run, walk. It is backwards from what we expect. Surely walking comes before running, running before soaring. But Isaiah goes in reverse — perhaps because the greatest miracle is not the dramatic soaring, but the ordinary walking without fainting. Day after day, year after year, simply continuing in faith when there is no ecstatic experience, no dramatic sign — just faithful plodding. And God's promise covers all of it: those who wait on Him will be renewed, whether soaring or walking.