The Eagle Stirs the Nest and Does Not Drop the Young

There is a gate at the top of the ridge that you have to lift and swing, and from the second post you can see the whole valley go from black to gray to gold in about eleven minutes if you stand there long enough, and lately he has been standing there long enough.

Five in the morning. Truck down on the track with the tailgate down and a flask on it. Dog somewhere in the sage doing dog business.

He has been up here every morning for a month and he could not tell you why.

Nothing is wrong. That is what he keeps coming back to. The place is in better shape than it has been in years. Everybody is well. He is not in debt to anybody who worries him.

But he is restless in a way he has not been since he was twenty two, and a man his age does not get restless for no reason, and he has been quietly running the list at night. What is coming. What is he about to lose. Which of the people he loves is this about.

That is the shape of it. He has taken a stirring and turned it into a countdown, because in his experience the only thing that unsettles a settled man is something bad on its way.

Come and lean on the tailgate, friend. Because there is a picture in Deuteronomy about a bird and a nest, and the whole point of it is the second half of the verse.

The bird takes the nest apart on purpose

Moses is singing near the end of his life, going back over how God handled a people in the desert, and he reaches for this.

As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings.Deuteronomy 32:11

Five verbs and they are all hers.

Stirreth up her nest. She unsettles it deliberately. Ornithologists will tell you the parent bird pulls out the soft lining so the thorns underneath come through and the nest stops being comfortable. That is not an accident, and it is not the nest failing. It is the bird.

And then, in the same breath: fluttereth over her young. Spreadeth abroad her wings. Taketh them. Beareth them.

The stirring and the carrying are the same bird in the same sentence. She is not unsettling them and then leaving to see how they do.

You are being stirred by Somebody whose next move in the same verse is to carry, and the stirring and the bearing are done by the same wings. That is not a comfortable spin on your restlessness; Deuteronomy 32:11 puts all five verbs on the eagle and puts the carrying last, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old song of Moses and lays it on a ridge at five in the morning with a flask on a tailgate. Whatever is unsettling you is not conducting an experiment.

Now the second half, and it is about the countdown you have been running.

You assumed the stirring must be a warning. That is not stupid, it is experience: most of the times in your life that something has shifted underneath you, it has been because something was coming.

But look at what the verse is actually a picture of. Not danger. A young bird being got ready to do the thing it was made for, by a parent who will not let it fall while it learns.

The unsettling in that image is aimed at what is next, not at what is about to be taken.

You have been reading a preparation as a warning, and the picture in that verse has flight at the end of it rather than loss. Deuteronomy 32:12 says so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that solitary leading a comfort in a man who has been lying awake making a list.

What I am not going to tell you

Now let me be plain, because this is where a man in your position gets sold something.

I am not going to tell you what is coming. I do not know. I do not know whether God is preparing you for something, whether you are at an age where men get restless, whether you have not had a proper rest in three years, or all of that at once.

And I am not going to build you a prediction out of a feeling. That is how people end up making large decisions on the back of a stirring they could not name, and then having to live in the wreckage of a plan God never authorized.

What the verse gives you is not information. It gives you the character of the One doing the stirring, which is more use at five in the morning than a forecast would be.

You are in the hands of a God whose whole recorded habit is to catch what He unsettles, and that is a fact about Him rather than a prediction about you. Isaiah 46:4 says even to hoar hairs will I carry you, I have made and I will bear, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise about carrying land on a man who has been bracing for a fall.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than call the dog.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed a man puts in the ground. Not the clarity of what you are sensing on a ridge. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.