“Never let the odds keep you from doing what you know in your heart you were meant to do.” H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Everyday we face decisions in our life and what we choose will determine the path that we walk. I remember coaching my son the other day about life and encouraging him as he is growing into an incredible man. We had this talk though about chicken and eagles. I told him the story about how the eagle was born alongside a brood of chickens. It was a story by Anthony DeMello and it goes like this:
A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.”
So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.
Everyday we make choices. Sometimes we choose to live life as somebody other than who we were created to be. We make choices that take us farther away from the life that we truly want to live. It is all about the choices. We have the freedom to make choices but we don’t have the freedom to choose our consequences. As I challenged my son, I challenged myself…are my choices bringing me closer to the person that God has intended me to be?
