“Jesus now moved about through the whole of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the good news about the new kingdom, and healing every disease and disability among the people.”

(Matthew 4:23 — Phillips)

Father Divine, with an entourage of his “angels,” was motoring along the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a fine day and everyone was enjoying the ride. Suddenly the long black limousines transporting the happy passengers were halted by a motorcycle cop. The officer arrested the party for speeding and hauled everybody into court. Proud feathers drooped. Father Divine was outraged. Later he said of the encounter: “I was rudely and unjustly treated with no proper recognition shown.” Promptly, by way of retaliation, Divine commanded his followers henceforth forever to refrain from traveling the Jersey Turnpike. In reporting the incident, the Richmond Times Dispatch ran this appropriate headline — Heavenly Wings Clipped.

Life has a way of clipping our wings now and then. Surely you’ve noticed. Sometimes our wings are clipped as were Father Divine’s and his “angels” by the guardians of our common life when we over-reach the standards of safety and fair play. The traffic officer, or the income tax collector, or the fellow traveler who thought we were sailing a bit too high, can, on occasion, quite effectively clip our wings.

And sometimes it’s just a combination of circumstances that clip our wings. I was flying out to Kentucky. A snowstorm prevented our plane’s landing on schedule in Lexington. Necessity forced us to fly on to Louisville. Bussing it slowly back, cold, late and tired, I arrived at my destination too fatigued to plunge into the heavy schedule laid out for me. Circumstances had clipped my wings.

But this is mere momentary inconvenience. Folks often experience a disastrous wing clipping — the kind that really hurts. We find that our dreams have not been realized and are perhaps not realizable — that we have been too ambitious for our capacities. Still others of us discover that we have progressed faster than our talents warranted and we are now harassed with feelings of inadequacy for the demands of life. And how that clips our wings! When early strength and endurance (which we had always taken for granted) begin to slip and health can no longer be depended upon; when there is pain in the place of exuberant zest for living and weakness where once strength abounded, our wings are clipped! When our large happy family, once the joy of existence, is blasted by separation, or the degeneration of characters have left us only mocking shells of what were once heartwarming companions, how this clips our wings!

When life clips our wings what are we to do? Well, there are some responses that never really help but are so often tried. For one thing, when life clips our wings we can retreat from reality and live in memories. We can sit down in melancholy meditation to conjure up out of the cold ashes of our former glory visions of what used to be. We can take a flight from reality when we can no longer really fly. This is what Job did when life clipped his wings:

“O that I were as in months past,” cries Job, “as in the days when God preserved me; when His candle shined upon my head, and when by His light I walked through darkness; when the Almighty was yet with me, and my children were about me. When I was held in honor in the gate and the nobles of the people waited expectantly to hear me speak. When in righteousness I delivered the poor — When I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame.”

But such spiritual regressions never grow any replacements for our spirit’s wings. Whether it is Job or Longfellow who sighs: “Turn backward, turn backward, O time in your flight; Make me a boy again just for tonight,” it is an idle and hopeless wish; nothing more than a momentary, psychological escape from the bitter reality of clipped wings.

“What Job does not seem to know is that out of trouble like his, a man may rise more noble, his harp furnished with new strings of deeper feeling, a finer light of sympathy shining in his soul.” But such recouped glory is definitely not achieved by escaping from present failure and despair into an idyllic past.

Still others, when life clips their wings at the zenith of their flight, immediately switch their destination from success to sympathy. Like swallows at eventide, suddenly wheeling and flying off in the opposite direction, some folks, when life clips their wings, wheel and flutter just as feverishly in search of sympathy as they had sought success. They turn the temple of life into a wailing wall, the cloth of our common table into a crying rag, and their companions in labor, with whom and for whom they joyously had labored, into cisterns of sympathy to which they come, eager to draw an inexhaustible supply of solace.

Still others whose wings life has clipped turn to personality destroying habits — not just drink and drug addiction, but to self-pity and self-excuse, and to the habit of laying the blame for life’s personal failure at others’ doors. So they commit suicide by degrees — not taking the one spectacular leap to doom, but throw life away with a series of shuffling and faltering steps downward into a moral and spiritual gutter.

Of course, none of these help the soul to fly again, yet are they the common choice of many a wing clipped soul, of many a one whom life has disabled. Needing help, they try the wrong kind. Once stopped, humiliated, crippled or defeated, they won’t travel the highway of life again, but take one of the dead-end detours.

But there is real help for the disabled when in the middle years we find ourselves brought low by one wing-clipping experience or another. When Rufus Jones was given an honorary degree to his Alma Mater, Haverford, the citation referred to him as an “impenitent optimist.” Now the great Quaker was not so characterized by virtue of the fact that nothing in his life had ever occurred to clip his wings. He was not always optimistic because nothing had ever arisen to be pessimistic about. His only son had died and the storms of the years had relentlessly beat upon him, yet was he still an impenitent optimist, still soaring aloft, proving that somehow, somewhere, help can be had when life clips our wings. A friend wrote of Rufus Jones that “to meet him was to feel set up for the day because he always made one confident that the best was yet to come.” Well, how did he do it? Where did he get his help?

The gospel tells us that Jesus brought help to people suffering from all forms of disabilities: not just the sick of body, but the sick of soul; not just those with crippled arms and legs, but those with spirit wings clipped. The record states: “Jesus moved about through the whole of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the good news about the new kingdom, and healing every disease and disability among the people.”

We must not miss the important significance in the threefold ministry of Jesus: teaching, preaching, and healing. Still Jesus gives help to the disabled, but the healing help for life’s disabilities comes within the fellowship of His church, not in some magical sudden way, but always in the same saving sequence: teaching, preaching, healing. Health and help come, but not without the teaching of His word and learning the mind and will of God, not without the proclamation of the gospel and the acceptance of this good news in one’s own life — the essence of which is not, “Here is the healthy life and the kingdom, achieve it;” but rather “receive it as the gift of God.”

Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin finds us failing to get the help we need when life disables us because we do not dwell within our defenses. We do not seek and receive steadily the whole of Christ’s healing ministry. In ancient Israel, cities of refuge were established for the protection of the hunted and hurt in the adventure of life. At one place the hunted is rebuked for his carelessness: “He should have remained in the city of his refuge.”

When life has clipped our wings and we suffer disabilities, too often we don’t get the help we need because we have not been abiding in the city of our refuge. See what defenses a merciful God has provided for us:

There is the fortress of faith — “the eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms” — but we have not remained within our defenses but sallied forth in our own pride. An experienced groom was telling a girl of the great racehorse, Man-O-War, and the races he ran. “He broke their hearts, that big red horse did, and no horse that ran against him was as good afterward.” “Why did he break their hearts?” asked the little girl. “They are full of pride, thoroughbreds are,” replied the groom, “it’s what makes them love to run. But when they meet a horse like that they find it’s no use trying. Part of their pride and spirit goes then. I never like to see a proud horse badly beaten. I don’t think he ever feels the same again.”

The man who has only his own pride to run on, when whipped, is out and done for, but he who has something more to sustain him than his own pinions, resources to be relied upon other than his own, when cut down by life will rise again. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.” Faith in God is a great fortress whence cometh our help if we abide within our defenses.

Another defense life affords us is home, family and friends. A catastrophe overtook a woman. Life very effectively clipped her wings. Naturally, one wondered how she would take it? But it was rather easy to predict: It was obvious what defenses her life had to sustain her. There was her faith — strongly, faithfully nurtured, week by week. The flight to God would be no strange journey for her. There was her family, for whom she had lived and invested her life prodigally — they would surround her with loving attention and care. There were her friends by the scores, of whom she was constantly thoughtful, who would rush to her comfort and assistance. Lo, she had prepared the city of her refuge and her help was sure!

And then there is our work — a most certain refuge. Emily Dickenson wrote to a friend: “I am glad you work. Work is a bleak redeemer, but it does redeem. But be sure you choose some motive for your work that is noble enough to sustain you when the cash profit is temporarily knocked out of it, some motive that satisfies the depths of your soul’s craving when the one for whose support you have been laboring no longer needs or can use your support.” Dr. Tolly Thompson tells of the lasting impression made on young John McNeill by the spirit in which his father went about his daily work. The lad’s earliest recollections were of a very humble home, just one room. His father was a poor man. He worked hard in a rock quarry. Each morning at five the father rose, dressed quietly, ate the little bowl of gruel, took up his frugal lunch and started out for the day’s work. The little boy, quietly lying in the bed, watched his father’s going, as all thought he was asleep. But before the father left he would pause at the door, bow his head and say, “I go forth to work this day in the name of the Lord.” John McNeill never forgot it. Work is a great defense if done unto God.

Another refuge for wing clipped souls, where help is surely found — is weekly worship and fellowship in the church of God. “I do not know about you,” said the young widow of a royal air force flyer, to a group of college students at a Y retreat — “I do not know about you, but for myself, individual, private worship is not enough. I need not only the love and strength of God mediated to me in my soul’s direct venture of prayer, but I need, I must have, the prayers, the love and fellowship of my friends within the church — which is God mediated to me in the communion of saints, or I cannot go on.”

And supremely, of course, there is our surest defense — Jesus Christ. “Other refuge have I none,” but we must cling to Him in daily indissoluble relationship of trust in His word and obedience to His will. And, so long as we remain in that unshatterable defense, our spirits though battered to the ground shall always rise again. Why? Because He has risen victoriously above all life’s defeats and in His strength we too can rise.

“If at one point in history the tyrant’s grip has been broken, then his reign is done. If one has shattered the myth of death’s invincibility, there is victory for all. In Karl Heim’s impressive figure: ‘Just as when a dyke in the low countries on the shore of the North Sea gives way, even if it is only one little section, we know that, although this is in itself an event of small importance, the consequences are incalculable: beyond the dyke is the tumultuous sea, which will burst through the opening — so Paul knew, when he had met the Risen One, that he is the firstborn of them that slept.” No defeat, no wing clipping experience of life can permanently ground any man who is Christ’s.

Are you abiding within your defenses? Life does clip our wings. Our soaring spirits on occasion will be stopped short in their headlong flight. Can we rise again? Only if we remain within our defenses where the sure help of God is made available for us through Christ.