Articles > Success: > What You Think—You Are

What You Think—You Are

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”¹

There's an old fable that talks about a man who found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life, the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken.

He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet in the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we're chickens."

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.²

How sad when we who are children of the King live as chickens when we could fly with the eagles.

As the old saying goes, “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

Suggested prayer: "Dear God, please help me to wait upon and hope in you and see realized in my life all that you have for me. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Proverbs 23:7 (NKJV).
2. Anthony DeMello from A 4th Course of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Copyright 1997 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Hanoch McCarty and Meladee McCarty.

<:))))><