The story is told about a farmer who caught a young eagle and placed it with his chickens. The eaglet ate with them and soon adopted itself to their ways. One day a friend was visiting the farm and noticed the eagle with the chickens in the barnyard. He said to the farmer, “What’s that eagle doing in there?” The farmer answered, “O, he doesn’t know he’s an eagle. He thinks he’s a chicken. He eats feed and does everything the chickens do. He’ll never fly!” But his friend said, “No, I don’t agree. He’s still an eagle because he was created to be one. He has the heart of an eagle and one day he will realize it.”
The farmer’s friend tried to prove it by encouraging the eagle to fly but unsuccessfully. Finally, one day he took him to the foot of a mountain just as the sun was rising. The instant the eagle got a vision of the rising sun, he uttered a wild scream of joy, stretched his wings, and flew off—never to return to the barnyard again.
O, for a vision of Jesus, the Son of Righteousness, that we may “mount up with wings as eagles…”