A common illustration of the effect that our Covenants with our Heavenly Father can have on our lives can be seen in the story of a young boy and his father flying a kite. The boy looks at the kite flying high in the air and he tells his father that the string is holding the kite back, and they should cut the string so that the kite can fly really high. The father wants to teach the boy so he cuts the string and the kite falls to the Earth. It seemed like the string was holding the kite down, but it was really helping to lift it up. This story is half right. It is true that the string is one of the things that is keeping the kite in the air, but there is another force at work. The kite is held aloft by a combination of the string tethering it to the ground, and the wind blowing against it. The tension produced by the wind blowing one way and the string pulling it another way is what generates the lift necessary to cause the kite to rise up into the sky. If the wind is blowing strongly, but the kite’s string has been cut, then the kite is just going to get blown around on the ground until it gets caught in something. But, if the kite is properly tethered but there is no wind, the kite is also not going to go anywhere. If we want to be lifted up by our Covenants, then praying and seeking for the fierce winds of adversity to be stopped or diminished is counterproductive. We need to both hold tightly to our covenants and face square on the devil and his mighty storms, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind. That tension between choosing to do the right thing in the face of intense opposition is the only way that we will generate enough lift to get us off the ground. We may think that we would be able to soar so much higher if only we didn’t have so many problems, but just like the little boy turned out to be wrong when they cut the kite’s string and it went down instead of up, so too would we be wrong if we thought that God silencing all of the winds and storms in our life would cause us to go higher instead of lower. Perfectly calm days are perfectly pleasant but you can’t fly a kite in them. I hope we can all learn to embrace the importance of both the string and the wind, our covenants and our trials, so that we can truly mount up as on the wings of eagles.
