When someone asks how I feel about Graduation, my stomach curdles. An oozing, crackling voice slips into my head to hiss, “It will all be gone. It will all be over. You will fall and shatter on the ground before you have the chance to spread your wings.”

Waving the misty voice away and bottling it up, I smile like a painted doll and fake excitement as a well-trained puppet. I don’t want to leave the warm, painstakingly formed nest behind because it took me four years to build it and only now has it started o feel like home. Now I know the brothers and sisters who fly or perch besides me; if I leave, will their memory of me fall apart like the nest I made?

“They will,” the stitched together voice breathes. “They have never even cared. After all, why should they?”
I shudder. The beastly voice adds with a chuckle, “And of course, why should you care, with a head of fog and a heart of a liar?”

If I am hearing these doubts, aren’t they true?
It does look like a long fall to the ground…

I try to ignore the accusations striking my brain and the fear that numbs my heart. But denial only engorges the Beast. It cackles and howls in my head, “I will hunt you until your life ends in a silent scream. I will choke the life from your meager plant and weak-rooted faith; I will clip your wings!”

I can’t cry out against the voice or my painted smile will crack.
“But perhaps I will not need to—” the Beast in my head muses, wrapping his
cruel claws of smoke and mist around my heart, “—because they will never grow big
enough to fly.”

Is it right?

After all of the twigs brought by friends and family to build up my nest, after the words from the King and the sacrifice of His son, will it not be enough? Will my wings be too small, too weak, too malnourished to fly?
But, who gave me these wings in the first place?

The oozing, hissing voice and my own whirling thoughts trapped me in a gilded cage so tight that I thought the golden bars were reality. A voice beaming with reverential power speaks alongside my own and I give sound to the words He grows in my head.
“The God who formed my wings will fill them with the wind necessary to fly. And if he lets me fall, then I will shatter in His healing hands.”
The Beast laughs and retorts with a smooth jeer, “But a lonely bird you will remain if your fellows keep flying while you fall.”

I forgot who I fly to.
I forgot I do not fly alone.

“Love is not trapped in a casket. It is not a servant to time or place. The friends
who have so kindly and humbly allowed me to participate in their lives will not disappear
into thin air like the smoke you are.”

The Beast laughs but his voice cracks with frightened bravado. He who formed my wings helps me to spread and hold them aloft, at the ready.

I can only say simply to the smoke and mist that quivers in the growing light of the dawn, “You may try to rend my body asunder if you catch me, but you can never have my soul. Because it is His, in spite of me.”

I will mourn this nest, but it is not the end. He reigns unconstrained to time, place, or the nest that warmed me for a time. The saints and fellow brilliant feathered ones cheer me on with shining smiles as He beckons. I keep my eyes on His face. Leaning forward, I flap my wings once, twice, thrice, then leap.

“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 to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they 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.” ~Isaiah 40: 28-31