The Sky Is Not Empty

My husband and I sit on the porch most mornings and watch the dawn arrive. It is a small ritual, nothing more than coffee and quiet and the slow lightening of the sky, but we rarely miss it.

This particular morning was still a bit overcast and calm. The lake lay still below the house. The air was crisp enough to feel on the back of my hands, and the birds nearby had already started their own morning business in the trees.

We know the eagles’ routine almost as well as our own. Every morning, they begin the day with a circling flight above the tree where they roost, calling to each other as they rise. We have watched it so many times it has become part of the dawn itself, something we expect the way we expect the light to come up over the ridge.

This morning, one of them did something I had never quite seen before.

I expected the usual. The eagle would lift off the roost, circle once or twice, then drop toward the lake to take a fish for breakfast. That is how the morning routine usually goes, and I had already settled into watching for it.

Instead, it turned.

Its enormous wings were stretched wide as it circled overhead, climbing higher and higher without a single flap. Then it turned again, glided across a patch of sky, dipped slightly, and began climbing once more.

There was no fish. There was no dive. There was only this slow, entrancing dance, circling and rising, circling and rising, as though for the sheer joy of it.

I watched, fascinated. How was it doing that? There was nothing up there. At least, nothing I could see. And then it occurred to me, and I laughed out loud.

“Would you look at that?” I said to my husband. “All we ever see is blue sky or gray sky. We would never imagine there’s a whole other world moving in there. And yet look at him. He’s showing us.”

The eagle was showing me something invisible.

I could see the bird. I could see the clouds. I could see the gray and blue sky stretching out behind it. But I couldn’t see the air currents carrying it.

Somewhere in that seemingly empty patch of sky, air was rising and falling, moving in different directions, creating invisible pathways the eagle knew how to follow. It would circle in one place, gaining height without moving its wings, then glide toward another place and begin climbing again.

I sat there absolutely delighted.

Imagine that! An entire landscape of movement right before my eyes, and I couldn’t see any of it!

Well, not until the eagle came along.

Then another thought occurred to me. What else was up there that I couldn’t see?

I’ve always loved looking at the sky. Although, now that I think about it, I don’t believe I’ve ever been content merely to look at it. I’ve always wanted to look through it. I suppose I’ve been doing that since I was little.

My father had what I always called eagle eyes. I don’t think he missed much of anything. He loved nature, and he was endlessly curious about the world around him. We had such fun discovering things together.

He taught us a game he called Unhiding. Instead of finding a place where no one could see us, we had to hide in plain sight. It sounds easy until you try it. The trick was to remain visible without being noticed. I loved that game. I still do, although these days I tend to play it a little differently.

My father, for a time, was also a medevac pilot, and he loved flying. He used to tell me that even when the sky looked dark and cloudy from the ground, the sun was shining just as brightly as ever above the clouds.

He knew. He’d been up there.

I remember loving that thought.

The clouds hadn’t disappeared. The gray sky wasn’t an illusion. But neither was it all there was. There was something beyond what I could see from where I stood.

Now, here I was, watching an eagle reveal another secret of that same sky.

I smiled, remembering my father and his eagle eyes. I wonder what he would have made of this.

There is a question I ask as a form of prayer every day. Whatever I am looking at, I try to look through it, past it, beyond it.

Lord, what am I seeing that I’m not seeing?

It’s a question I’ve asked for years. I even ask this while studying Scripture. I read a passage, sometimes one I’ve read dozens of times before, and wonder what might be there that I’ve overlooked. A word. A repeated phrase. A small detail tucked into a familiar story.

Something hiding in plain sight.

And this morning, watching that eagle, I found myself asking the very same question.

Lord, what am I seeing that I’m not seeing?

Then I laughed again.

Because here was an eagle, of all things, helping me discover something that had been right before my eyes all along.

I wondered whether God was answering my familiar question in a rather delightful way. Not by showing me something that hadn’t been there before, but by helping me notice what was already there.

The eagle hadn’t created those currents. They existed whether I noticed them or not. It simply knew how to move within them.

And by watching it, I was beginning to see what I couldn’t see.

I thought about how often that happens when I read Scripture. Sometimes a passage I’ve known for years suddenly opens in a way I hadn’t noticed before.

The words haven’t changed; but I have begun to see something that was there all along.

That’s why I keep looking. At the sky. At the lake. At the trees. At the stars. At the pages of Scripture.

There’s always something more to wonder about.

I watched the eagle until it soared beyond the trees. Then I looked back at the sky.

It looked just as it had before. But I could no longer call it empty.

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