“Dr. Waldron,” the lady sitting
across from me said. “I’m just so
worried. I’m having trouble sleeping at
night.”
“Really?” I asked.
“What are you worried about?”
“Well,” she said. “It feels kind of silly to talk about, but my
chickens aren’t laying many eggs these days.
They’ve been real good chickens for me – they’re Red Star Chickens – but
I wonder if their days are numbered. I
just can’t afford to feed them if they aren’t laying eggs.”
“Maybe they are going into
hen-o-pause,” I suggested.
“I haven’t heard of that,” she
responded. “Is that a thing chickens do, and
do they come out of it?”
I am no master of chicken
husbandry, but I did my best to assuage her fears. “I’m guessing they are just molting,” I
said. “Egg production drops for a couple
of months and then it picks back up. I
guess you’ll just have to decide if you are OK with fewer eggs for a month or
two.”
She shook her head. “Even if they start laying again, I can see
the writing on the wall. There will come
a time when they stop completely and that makes me sad. They’re such pretty chickens and I almost
feel like we have a friendship.”
It was an unusual
conversation. Many people have deep
sadness when a dog or cat dies, but few have deep spiritual connections with
their chickens. Still, anxiety leads to
folks borrowing trouble from the future to put onto today’s already full plate.
Jesus told His followers, “Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof.”
(Matthew 6:34)
The point of the proverb is not
that tomorrow won’t have troubles and difficulties. In fact, it probably will. It just isn’t helpful to stress about them
ahead of time.
When I was growing up, we had a
food pyramid that purported to show what foods you should include in your diet and
the amounts of each one – fats and oils were in a tiny triangle at the top and
grains at the bottom.
Apparently, this concept was too
confusing for children of the 90s, because in 2011, the pyramid was replaced
with “My Plate” which had sections for dairy, fruits, grains, vegetables, and
protein. Scientists thought this would
be better at helping folks understand how they should eat (I don’t actually
think it has helped – people eat the same whether they picture a plate or a
pyramid).
The point really is
that if we view our day as a plate with sections – work, play, sleep, and so
on, the section that contains trouble (call it stress if you like) is already
full. Sure, you can stack more on top of
it. You could make a mini-sky scraper of
your difficulties, causing them to tower above the other portions of the plate
like Godzilla over Tokyo. It will only
succeed in making today miserable and won’t help tomorrow at all.
So far, this all seems depressing. Every day will have disasters – small and
great – and we’ll just have to struggle our way through them.
Jesus didn’t want this thought
to depress His followers. His was a call
to joy and trust. Our heavenly Father
takes care of birds and flowers, can’t we trust Him to take care of us and our
futures?
I will admit that I’ve had to
back off the amount of time I spend on social media in recent days (that’s
probably a good thing). I have found it
pushing me both to anger and anxiety and neither one of those is an appropriate
emotion for someone who trusts his Father.
Of course, the things I worry
about are much more important than whether or not molting hens will begin to
lay again, but regardless of whether my anxieties are over problems in the
chicken coop or a possible World War III, I can bring them to my heavenly
Father and leave them with Him. He loves
me enough to take care of me, even if the very foundations of civilization are
falling apart.
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