UPFRONT January 5, 2009 Issue

BIRDS AND SHELTER—AND HOME

STEVE GRAHAM, SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR

Recently I watched a huge flock of birds soaring up over a brown Pennsylvania cornfield. Their flight was fast and strong and coordinated, choreographed against the low-angled late-November sun.

Considering that scene a little later, I thought of Psalm 91, rich with imagery of birds and shelter—and home. It dawned on me that each one of those soaring creatures in the sky was nurtured as a defenseless nestling, sheltered from storms and predators and falls to the ground. From the moment it hatched, each was housed in what Mary Baker Eddy called the "Love that guards the nestling's faltering flight" (Poems, p. 4). And each lived to soar.

Today, you or someone you know may be feeling as vulnerable as a nestling, faltering in the ability to keep a roof over your head, threatened with foreclosure, perhaps uncertain about where you're going to live or how you'll be able to stay where you are. Well, the ideas in this magazine are here to help you rise up to the practical spiritual understanding that you're right now in the safest, securest place imaginable. And you'll stay there, too, because you can't leave God's care.

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