What is the most tired you have ever been? I guess the winner in my life has to be a night on call at the hospital, not one in particular, but any one of the many all-nighters that I have pulled through the years. I have decided that I am still “the man” when it comes to running to the hospital at 2AM, but if I get more than one call a night then I am toast. Nothing like being at the hospital from 2300 to 0230 hours, getting home at 3 and getting called back at 3:30 after your head has only been on the pillow for a few minutes. And if you actually have gone to sleep it is harder to wake up than if you were in a persistent vegetative state. You see, that second call is the killer. And if there is a third one, forget it, I might as well shave and go to work another day. Or maybe forget the shave as I am likely to cut my lips off if I am that tired. I have also concluded two things, one you can’t make up sleep and two, the older I get the less I like being on call. My need to be needed succumbs to a “just let me sleep” modus operandi.
But there are other times that I have been drop-in-your-tracks tired. I will never forget our first trip to Walt Disney World, which under even the most ideal conditions is a formidable challenge even for the Type A vacationer like myself. It was July and it was hotter than blazes and we had been in the Magic Kingdom for about 15 hours. Top that off with the fact that Eric was about 7 and Emily was about 4, and throw in the fact that we got to the park an hour early and left at closing at 1AM, and you understand why we were whipped. I guess after spending about a gazillion bucks, I wanted to stay there every second to get my money’s worth, which is not possible. I had resolved to see the thing close and be the last one there after spending about 75 bucks on hamburgers and bottled water, and I was tireder than a Gillian’s Island rerun. To add insult to injury, we then waited in line with about 13,000 people all trying to crowd on the monorail, and it was then I decided then and there that I was experiencing a new level of tired. I also seriously was contemplating shoving an overly irritating Mickey Mouse in front of the monorail as he was carrying the Disney experience too far. The only reason that I didn’t was that I didn’t want to get out of the kiosk and lose my place in line for a trip back to the hotel. And besides, if I offed the ubiquitous mouse people would think I was a rat. But I did want to grab him by those big ears and shake the Mickey out of him.
I am getting tired just talking about being tired. When are you the most tired? Steve and I spoke this week, and he told me about being so sleepy while driving back from the inauguration. I too have been tired in the car. I hate it when I get so tired that I cannot keep my eyes open, especially since sleeping while driving can get you dead faster than a Michael Phelps apology. I can recall driving back from Fayetteville about midnight while Eric was in Law School there. I was so tired. Dianna and I would stop every 25 miles, walk around, slap ourselves silly, get a drink, kick the tires and swap turns driving. We both were miserable. I almost stopped in Russellville to get a room for the night, even though it is only about an hour from Maumelle. Of course, nothing will wake you up faster than the sound of your tires hitting the rough part of the shoulder of the road at 75 miles per hour. I am getting tired just thinking about it.
Then there is the tired that comes from sheer labor, from working too hard. Maybe it is from helping a loved one move who lives in an upstairs apartment who even though younger than her old man skipped out this morning. Maybe it is from working in the yard all day. Maybe it is from staying up too late from writing a Saturday night sermon. Or maybe it is from not enough play.
I think that there are different kinds of tired. There is the tired from running a 5K, but it is a satisfying kind of tired. Ditto for raking leaves or accomplishing an important task. You can take an ibuprofen and sleep well over a job well-done.
Then there is the tired that is whole-body tired. Your mind is tired and you soul is tired. It is this kind of tired that leads to exhaustion. It is this kind of tired that leads to burnout. It is this kind of tired that make us want to withdraw and collapse. It is this kind of tired that is a drudgery that makes us miserable and sometimes it is difficult to recover from. Rest doesn’t always recharge us from this kind of tired.
We have suffered with this kind of tired this past week with the illness of Dianna’s dad. My poor wife has lived at Baptist Medical Center being the kind of daughter we all hope we have someday. I marvel at her drive to do right, her commitment and her compassion. Dealing with a serious illness is a big burden, and we wonder how we can muster the energy to continue doing what we know we have to do. Maybe it is like the forgotten and nameless wise person who told me years ago, “You don’t know what you can do until you have to.” And we do so because we can, and even if we faint we have to get up and keep going. Because we have to, and that is reason enough.
I is probably because of my life situation right now, but today’s Old Testament Lectionary text got my attention. It is a classic oft quoted verse, “but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. If something can give us strength not to faint, then I am all ears.
This classic passage is rich in imagery and the majesty of the Almighty. We get a glimpse of God‘s grandeur here, this is the theistic God who is wholly other and not like us at all. This God is beyond our comprehension and we are mere grasshoppers in his sight. Listen to the words of the writer of deutero-Isaiah again: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.”
Well, this God is big, he’s so big he’s huge. And if we fastidiously pay homage to him, we might ride his coattails and share in the glory, which after all when it boils down to it, is what most of us are after. We want to be powerful, we want to have the upper hand over our enemies, and we want to walk streets of gold. But even if we can’t relate to those things, we want to live large in the here and now; we want to be blessed in ways by Yahweh that would make anyone want what we’ve got. We want a payoff for serving God faithfully, we need his blessings whatever those are. If nothing else, we should be strong enough to deal with the absurdities of life. I also think that we want something else : we want to soar like an eagle. It is as the songwriter says:
You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord,
Who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My Refuge,
My Rock in Whom I trust.”
The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear;
Under His Wings your refuge,
His faithfulness your shield.
You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day,
Though thousands fall about you,
Near you it shall not come.
For to His angels He’s given a command,
To guard you in all of your ways,
Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
What inspiring lyrics. Makes me want to soar, and soaring is appropriate as February is eagle month in Arkansas. Every year, the American Bald Eagle winters in Arkansas in ever- increasing numbers. Some years ago, my family attended the “Eagle Weekend” at Lake DeGray along with the Barnes. We took a barge trip on the lake to look for eagles in the early morning. It was very cold and we saw no signs of eagles-only a few ducks were spotted. I thought that I had seen an eagle, but the guide told me it was only a buzzard. When I asked how to tell the difference, he said that an eagle in flight was unmistakable, and that I would recognize an eagle when I spotted one.
The guide was right. I saw several eagles that day, and they were something special to observe. An eagle’s wings in flight are flat as an airplane’s wing with no “V” or angle to them whatsoever. An eagle is a strong flyer, and it hardly ever flaps its wings, and it does not wabble or flutter in the wind. There are no herky-jerky movements, it simply and profoundly glides or soars at a high rate of speed with grace and majesty. The eagles in flight were a breath-taking sight to behold. And now every winter we go to DeGray or Holla Bend near Dardenelle to catch a glimpse of these magnificent creatures.
And of course we want to soar with wings like eagles, because it is the ultimate high. When we are soaring we are far above our troubles whatever they are. We are immune to the mundane, we are far from the ordinary. We are powerful, we are protected, and we are sheltered from all that is below. When we soar, the world is our perch and nothing can slow us down. What a feeling. I have soared a few times in my life, and you undoubtedly have too.
However, I can tell you this; I have not done much soaring lately, so where does that leave me? Does that make God less relevant in my life? Maybe. Here in Isaiah we have a picture of a powerful God whom we are like grasshoppers in comparison. And he can wipe even the most powerful of us from the face of the earth without regard. Isaiah paints something of this picture as he tries to put us in our place and lets us know in no uncertain terms and God is powerful and we are nothing. It is as Paul Tillich says of this the writer of this passage:
Probably we should challenge, ironically or angrily, their seeming pretentiousness; and we should point to the immense gap between the ideal situation, dramatized by the prophet, and the catastrophic reality in which we live. We should dismiss him as an annoying optimist, not worthy of our attention. Perhaps we should become bitter and full of hatred toward him. That would be our natural response to someone who desires to comfort us in a situation in which we do not see any possible comfort and desperately disbelieve any possible hope. But the situation of the exiles in Babylon, sitting by the rivers and weeping, was one of just such hopelessness. The prophet must have expected this kind of reaction, for he spoke in a way that made the exiles listen to him, 2500 years ago. And his words should be significant for us, the exiles of today. He was not less, but rather more, realistic than we are. He knew that such a situation was not a matter of chance and bad luck, but that it is the human situation, which no man and no period can escape. . .(The Shaking of the Foundations, Paul Tillich, Chapter two, “We Live in Two Orders”).
Indeed there is a great difference between the ideal and the real; between soaring with eagles and the street that most of us live on called the human predicament. I for one take no comfort in the view of the theistic God who sits on some high and mighty throne and does nothing to help his children out of a pickle. I take little comfort in the powerful if it doesn’t make a difference in my life here and now. I mean every once in a while the Almighty should throw a bone in the direction of his faithful servants, and yet sometimes we stumble and falter through times where we do anything but fly.
So for those of you out there today who are soaring, God Bless You. For those whose lives are at peace, Praise God. For those whose faith has made you strong and sure, Amen to you. But for those of you who are in no mood to hear about how great and powerful God is when you are not soaring with eagles and in fact can’t even get off the ground, God help you.
I am in that place. My father-in-law was diagnosed this past week with cholangiocarcinoma, and the week before that I had barely heard of it and couldn’t pronounce it. It is the worst possible kind of cancer, the badest of the bad, and only one percent of its victims live a year, one in a hundred, and my family finds ourselves reduced to a crawl. Forget flying, we are barely moving. I don’t want to hear about how old he is (he is 86) and how he has lived a long and good life. Of course those things are true. I don’t want to hear how better off he will be, because even though that is decidedly true, my wife and mother-in-law are not feeling better off, and because they are in a tough place so am I.
So what good is this high and mighty God of Isaiah at a time like this? I wouldn’t want to fly today even if he gave me the wings to do so. I am just not in the mood. God is big as Isaiah says, so could send a miracle this way, but that would only postpone our grief as no one lives forever. He could point us to the answer of why we get sick and suffer, but that wouldn’t make Boyd Haley’s suffering go away. We could simply bow down and scrape some more and pay homage to his power, but none of it is coming our way, or trickling down to us. Or is it?
As one who has done a lot of walking and almost fainting this week, I find myself reaching for anything to give me strength, and ironically that strength is in this passage as well. Again Tillich enlightens us:
But he does not remain in the depths of his melancholy: Over against human mortality the word of God shall stand forever. There is something eternal to which we can cling: Be not afraid, the Lord God shall come with strong hand. So the wave rises, and then again it falls: The nations are as a drop of water and a piece of dust; all the nations are as nothing before Him, they are counted as less than nothing. Again the wave rises: God stands above the circle of the earth, above all created things, above the highest and the lowest! And when once more the wave falls and the servant of God complains that he does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectation. He gives power to the faint and to him that hath no might He increaseth strength. He acts paradoxically; He acts beyond human understanding (Tillich).
You see the Good News this morning is not about soaring with eagles, or just soaring with eagles, it is the ability to walk and not faint. It is the greatest of all feats of strength, and it is much harder than flying. Just when you think you cannot continue, when you cannot put one more foot in front of the other, you somehow do. And behind that somehow is someone. And when we get to the end of our selves we find God right there. You know the one, the one who made the heavens and the earth. When we get to our can’t we find God’s can. You see, we draw upon our resources when we are wounded, and we are as only as strong as those around us, and that is the message. It is not about soaring with eagles; it is about walking and not fainting, the highest gift of an all powerful God to his frail and very human children.
The truth is this: I see people every day in my job at Baptist Health that probably haven’t done any soaring in a long time. I will have to admit that it may have been a while since I have soared as well. If it is true of you too, then listen: We don’t soar because our wings get clipped by the difficulties that we experience in life. We don’t soar because some days we don’t feel like it, don’t have time for it, or have simply forgotten how to fly. Perhaps we don’t soar because we feel used up, burned-out or stressed out. Maybe we don’t soar because we are missing that necessary component of flying called waiting on the Lord that Isaiah mentions.
I have to admit that for a long time I was troubled as to how this verse read. I felt like the order of the verse was backwards. The verse would have been easier to understand if it read, They shall walk and not faint, they shall run and not being weary, and they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The progression seemed off to me, because soaring majestically with the eagles should come last in the verse as an ultimate goal for ourselves. But Author John Claypool in his book “Tracks of a Fellow Struggler” helped me to understand that the progression is correct. I believe that if working at Baptist seeing thousands suffer and die has taught me little else it has taught me this: It takes less hope, less of God’s grace, to soar as an eagle than it does to walk and not faint. It is easy to soar high when life is going well, when we feel good, when we feel strong, when things are going right. We need less of God’s help to soar at these times. Instead, it is those times in our lives in which it takes every ounce of strength, all the resolve we can muster, just to walk without passing out. That is where we find God’s amazing grace shining the brightest.
We all see people every day that life has thrown a curve and they feel “grounded.” Let us all remember that one needs hope to fly. But flying is only a prerequisite for building the strength for facing life’s challenges that inevitably come our way in life. So the next time you feel like you have been reduced to a crawl, look around. It is precisely there that God’s grace shines through and helps us continue, even when we are not sure if we can take another step. And the greatest blessing, our greatest personal resource, is learning to walk and not faint. Ironically, to do so is to take our first flying lesson.
So today I stand before you to proclaim loudly that when we can go on and put one foot in front of another when we are faint, we discover that we do not ever walk alone, and that my friends is the Good News. In case you missed it, the Good News has sounded sounds like this for several thousand years:

Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.