I have been reading an excellent book entitled "A Passion for the Impossible - the Life of Lilian Trotter." This extrodinary woman was a missionary to Algeria's Muslims back in the late 1800's. She was a gifted artist and observer of nature. She wrote many devotionals based on lessons observed from flowers, trees, animals.
I found the lesson she wrote about the 'martens' very apropos to what God has been teaching me. I share it now with you.
"The martens have been reading me a faith lesson. They come in flights at this time of year - lovely things with blue throats and feathered claws -
Their faith lesson is this - that their wings need the sense of
'an empty void' below to give them a start
- their leg muscles have no spring in them and when they perch by accident on a level place they are stuck fast
- poor things we did not know that natural history fact in the past and when we have found them on our flat Alger roof
with its parapet protection, we have thought they had got hurt somehow, and more than once we have tried to feed them till they died,
instead of doing the one thing that they needed - tossing
them off into emptiness.
So we need not wonder if we are not allowed to stay long in
level sheltered places - our faith wings are like the martens
and mostly need the gulf of some emergency to give them
their start on a new flight.
We will not fear when we feel empty air under them."Lilias Trotter 30 April 1908
