Birdie didn’t seem particularly pleased to see us.
At least I think it was Birdie. One of the roosters, anyway (and the only one, to my knowledge, who’s been given a name by our Grandsons.) He raised a ruckus, Birdie did, when we pulled up to the house.
Sounding the alarm? Registering a protest … that “breakfast” was arriving closer to “lunchtime”? Who really knows what a rooster’s squawks are meant to communicate?
Maybe if you hang around poultry on a regular basis, you learn to decipher their sounds a bit more accurately. But that’s not us – my Sweetie and I. We’re definitely rookies at chicken-raising. Minor-leaguers, called in to “chicken-sit” for a day or two … while Daughter and family take a brief break from the relentless daily rhythms of their little farm.
Watering the chickens, that was the easy part. Refreshing and refilling the water pans scattered about the coop … turns out it’s a lot like watering the flowers in my back yard – so, no big deal. But then it came time to gather up the eggs.
A laying hen’s brain is not burdened by a lot of logic, I discovered. She’ll drop an egg just about anywhere … so watch your step! And beware the bird that gets broody on you: She may not appreciate your attempt to remove the orb from beneath her breast.
Make that “orbs”: When I finally screwed up the courage to remove the egg I could see, I discovered she was sitting on four or five more that were obscured under her feathers. There’s no way she could have laid them all – the tint of their shells suggested they’d come from several different birds. And yet this Mother Hen decided she might as well try to hatch them. Like I said, not a lot of logic involved in the equation.
This is the sort of thing you learn when you agree to chicken-sit for a couple of days – assuming you’re teachable. But that’s not always the case, is it? Sometimes our hearts calcify, like the guy we meet in today’s gospel passage: “Do not bother me,” he says to his needy late-arriving friend. “The door has already been locked.”
But Jesus tries to show us that different standards apply to those who live in the Kingdom: “Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” We will receive eggs, not scorpions, when we pray to receive the Holy Spirit’s gifts and fruits. God knows what we need, it seems, even before we ask.
So why bother asking? Why bother praying? Perhaps it’s about screwing up the courage … to find something we did not expect, nestled deep in our hearts. Perhaps our asking “thy will be done” ultimately makes us a little more open to receive what God wants to give, what God knows will make us whole and holy.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 