Sunday Reflection – When Wings Take Flight

🙏🦅🦋Sunday Reflection – When Wings Take Flight

This week, I received some news that broke my heart.

For many years, I have followed Jackie and Shadow, the beautiful bald eagles of Big Bear. I watched them return to their nest, prepare it for another season, care for their eggs and raise their young. Year after year, they became a small but treasured part of the rhythm of the seasons for me.

Jackie and Shadow had been together for eight years.

This week, Jackie died.

I was surprised by how deeply I felt the loss of a wild eagle I had never touched and had only known through a camera. But perhaps that is one of the gifts of loving God’s creation. We don’t have to possess something for it to become precious to us.

And then, on that very same day, something happened in my own little corner of the world.

I opened the door to let Candy outside, and from my Vego Garden flew a beautiful black butterfly with yellow markings.

And then another.

Earlier this summer, I had watched black swallowtail caterpillars living and feeding among the plants in that garden. Eventually they disappeared, and I wondered where they had gone.

Now two beautiful butterflies were taking flight from the very place where those little caterpillars had once fed and grown.

I stood there thinking about Jackie.

One beautiful life had ended, while right before my eyes, two others seemed to be beginning a completely new chapter.

It felt like one of those quiet moments when God gently reminds us to look around.

Life has seasons.

There is a time for beginnings and a time for endings. There are moments when we have to say goodbye, even when we aren’t ready. And there are moments when, sometimes unexpectedly, new life unfolds right in front of us.

The butterflies did not take away my sadness over Jackie. They weren’t supposed to.

But they reminded me that sorrow and hope can exist together.

As Christians, we believe that death is not the end of the story. We grieve because we love, but we also live with the promise of resurrection and new life.

Perhaps that is why those two butterflies touched me so deeply.

On a day when I was thinking about a beautiful pair of wings that would no longer return to a familiar nest, I opened my own back door and watched two new pairs of wings rise from my garden.

Sometimes God’s reminders are not loud.

Sometimes they are as gentle as wings.

“Behold, I make all things new.” — Revelation 21:5

🌿 May we notice the quiet reminders of hope God places along our path, especially on the days when our hearts are hurting.

Helene

Rosemary Thyme