Another Chicken Parable
In which chickens teach me about comfort zones, producing fruit, and worship....
The weather has been warm enough to move my chickens out of the coop and into the chicken tractors.
Chicken tractors are mobile coops that roll around the yard.
After a whole winter cooped up in the coop, the chickens should have been very happy to graze green grass and feel the Spring breezes.
But they weren’t.
They went from laying eight or nine eggs a day to none. I thought maybe the stress of being caught (my eight year old helped) kept them from laying, but after two weeks with only one or two eggs, I knew they didn’t like being out of their box.
I tried different feed, different routines, and different straw in their nest boxes. Nothing worked, and eggs are expensive! I wondered if I would have to move them back into their winter coop after all.
Finally, my husband helped me put a roof over the nest boxes. Immediately, they got back into egg production. Now, we’re back to normal.
I was thinking about my chickens at church this morning. Worship is so different than our regular routines. Quiet is so different than the noise that intrudes on every moment. Fellowship is the opposite of the quarrelsome cattiness we’re used to.
It was potluck Sunday, and several young people quickly offered to help in the kitchen. I was appreicative of their offer to help, but I also reassured them that all the food was ready and encouraged them to focus on worship.
“Worship?” said one, “I don’t even know how to do that.”
None of us do if we keep our minds on the places we’ve come from. I found myself singing a secular song as I walked from the kitchen to the sanctuary, and that’s when I thought about my chickens.
I can’t produce spiritual fruit because God pushes me right out of the boxes I have put myself in. I liked the comfortable familiar, the noise of my own making, but He says, “Be still and know that I am God.”
Just like a chicken flourishing in the freedom of green, grassy meadows, once the Lord has taught my heart to worship Him, I should never want to go back to the coop. Instead of taking my coop-ish thinking with me into worship, I should take the renewed mind He’s given me to all my other settings.
Jesus taught that exact truth when He said: “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin…So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
We’ve been freed from the confines of our former ways of thinking and doing things so that we can offer the gift of our worship to God. When we worship, God remakes our hearts and minds so that we can glorify Him in all of our daily routines.
He covers us, like my husband adding a roof to the nest boxes, so that we will be secure enough in Him to produce fruit.
Read More Chicken Parables HERE
