Eagles Raised as Chickens

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As I slowly watch Facebook taken over as a place to regurgitate memes, I withdraw from the world of social networking. I have to wonder what the people who spend time creating these things might accomplish if they put their minds to something more important than entertainment. The energy expended for a few moments of transitory and imagined fame does not match the return on the investment.

A few weeks ago, I caught a student watching videos unrelated to class on his iPAD during class. Aside from the problem of using college bandwidth to do this, I have to wonder what else he might have accomplished with the energies otherwise expended. I took him aside and told him in no uncertain terms "if you paid as much attention to Chemistry, you might be better at chemistry".

Most of these students intend to be medical professionals. With the rest of them, I discussed the importance of focusing themselves on the task at hand. How many of them want to be a patient who goes to a doctor who didn’t pay attention during schooling and who does not pay attention during the procedure? Then I asked them how many of them desire to be that kind of a doctor? You see, all of them will lose patients one day, and they will be able to get over them unless they lose the patient as a consequence of negligence or malpractice.

In his landmark work, The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis writes about how the Adversary tries to steal our time and render us impotent for positive changes. Eventually we spend our lives doing neither what we like nor what we ought, and the devil wins if he wastes our time.

Several years back, an old friend of mine from high school made the following insight about me that I believe to be fairly accurate. She said, "I suspect, Doug, that you have a great ability to see what people are capable of becoming, and when they do not rise to the opportunity, you are devastated". I have long believed that most of us are Eagles who were raised to believe we are chickens. The story is told of a naturalist who visited a farm and saw an eagle in pecking with the chickens. He informed the farmer that he had an eagle, but the farmer insisted it was a chicken. Years before, he'd found a large egg and placed it in with the others and raised the bird as a chicken. Seriously? Who ever saw a chicken with an eight foot wingspan!

The naturalist set about proving that the bird was an eagle. He put the eagle on a fence post, got its attention and sternly told it as he pointed its face to the sky, "You are an eagle. Fly!" The eagle jumped down and began scratching with the chickens. Next, the naturalist took the eagle up atop the barn, pointed its face to the sky and said, "You are an eagle. Fly!" The eagle jumped down and resumed pecking. Finally, the naturalist took the bird high into the hills where it could not see the farm, pointed its face to the sky, and insisted more sublimely than before, "You are an eagle. Fly!" The eagle looked up, stretched out its wings, and flew, never to be seen again. "That," said the naturalist, "is an eagle."

Despite our potential for greatness, we are taught that we are chickens. For fear of being arrogant or vain or threatening to those around us, we hold ourselves back, believing it to be safer or better if we just peck around for food with the rest of the chickens. Consequently, many of us are lucky to 'scratch' out any kind of meaningful existence with the rest of the barnyard rabble. As long as we ignore our potential, we will never excell at Chemistry or Surgery or driving a big-rig or painting murals. We will spend our lives doing neither what we ought nor what we like. We are not chickens; we are eagles.

The following is often misattributed to Nelson Mendela (yet another one of those memes being falsely propagated on the internet) but actually comes from the book Return to Love by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

You were born to lead. You were born for glory. You were born in a time with the greatest technological, educational, vocational, intellectual, and philosophical opportunities of any time ever seen on this earth. As we decide the destiny of man, remember that of whom much is given much is required. We may not be responsible for past generations, but we cannot escape responsibility for this one; our time has come, and our obligation is clear- to act like the eagles we are and soar.