Fear No Eagle
It is always quite humorous to hear the botching of perfectly good lyrics, words, and phrases that children come up with; sometimes eyebrow-raising, even embarrassing, but yes, always funny. I spent a good deal of time today thinking about how one of my children has interpreted a certain verse out of Psalms 23.
“Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no eagle”
Perhaps it begs some explanation as to why a small one would hear, absorb, and conceive this as making sense.
A while back, my husband procured a game for the kids to play on the Ipad called ‘Oregon Trail’.
In this game, you choose your characters and various criteria about food, money, and I don’t know what all, as you travel by covered wagon from the beginning of the trail (Missouri?) to Oregon. The actual journey in times past was a rather dangerous and difficult experience; so naturally, while the game includes many good things that can happen, it seems that even more bad things can happen, to the degree one might not complete the game at all.
On their first try at this game, my kids chose their characters as Pa, Ma, Mary and Laura (Ingalls). Not too far into the journey, Laura was abducted and eaten air-lifted by an eagle and never returned. What trauma! My kids love Mary and Laura. :)
My guess is that the creators of the game figured that if they chose something so incredibly impossible as an eagle carrying off whole people, it would be understood as laughable. Not so here in the Nyveldt household. We fear eagles.
So now, can you see why it would make complete sense to a young mind that we really do need a reason not to fear the eagles? As I contemplate this picture, I actually don’t mind too much the misinterpretation. Small kids can hardly wrap their minds around the concept of ‘evil’. While they do comprehend their propensity to do wrong and ‘the lions under the bed’, it is not interpreted as ‘evil’ and I would certainly hope not, therefore the ‘eagles’ add a degree of reality to the scripture that is not entirely out of place.
Fear no eagle. I like that. We will keep that for now.
