Yet Another Chicken Lesson
A few days ago, I was planning to take a walk with a friend, so I packed them up a half-dozen eggs ahead of time. I’d managed to recently distribute several dozen, so I was down to my last six eggs for myself, which is fine – I’m getting eight to nine eggs a day right now!
However, while I popped out to run an errand, Baxter the poodle managed to coax the basket off the counter and eat all the rest of my eggs – the shells on the floor were the testament to his misdeeds.
Hmm. The thought crossed my mind: Should I keep at least some of the eggs I had packed up for my friend?
“Do you have a plethora of eggs right now?” my friend asked as I handed them the half-carton.
“Well, actually no,” I explained, “Just an hour ago, Baxter snarfed the remainder of the eggs and these are the last ones remaining. But it’s okay! I want you to have them. The chickens will have laid more in the morning and I’ll go out to the coop before I fix my breakfast!”
So the next morning I put my rainboots on under my pajama pants and head to the backyard to make possible my daily routine of a fried egg with my breakfast. However, when I opened the nesting box door, there were…
NO EGGS.
Rather surprised and disappointed, I proceeded to eat my cardamom-chocolate bun and my coffee, even without the nutritionally-balancing fried egg and kimchi.
Later in the day, I retrieved three eggs from the nesting box. It was a light day – perhaps the chickens were needing a break, or maybe some more treats. Maybe they were stressed about something, or maybe it was just a day of rest.
The eggs showed up, but not at the time and in the quantity I was expecting.
I was so sure. I had full faith in my ladies that they would deliver. That faith directed my generosity.
But having faith in something doesn’t make it happen they way we have trained ourselves to expect. My faith had to get redirected. I was going to have to wait longer for what I thought would appear suddenly. I was going to have to lean into other resources outside of my habits.
So much of the time, we equate faith with assumption. But faith usually turns assumption on its head. The nutitional resources I assumed would come to me through a fried egg were actually needed to nourish the hens that day instead of me. God provides…but often vastly differently from the way we might have been expecting.
It’s been a hard week, full of triggering anniversaries and encounters, sleep deprivation, and the increased volume of self-criticism that happens right before my period. I’m weepy, discouraged, and trying to remember to not completely trust the self-hating voices clamoring for attention at this time of the month.
One of the ways I remind myself is through a brief examen at the end of the day, rooted in the practice of Saint Ignatius. Similar to the way I ask the kids their favorite and sad times of the day, I ask myself when did I most sense God’s presence, and when did I feel furthest away from God’s love? I am struck by how often the answer to that first question is an encounter that is usually unplanned. Sensing God’s presence can happen through the development of our predictions and assumptions, but faith is less about fulfilling certain expectations and more about trusting that God’s love is going to show up in ways we just haven’t imagined yet. It’s about releasing what we think should happen and welcoming in whatever is emerging.
It’s okay to equate faith with assumption sometimes. Having faith that there would be more eggs the next morning enabled me to be generous with my friend, even in the face of shifting realities due to a misbehaving dog.
The truth of there being no new eggs at breakfast time wasn’t a delegitimization of the faith I had that nourishment would be provided. Rather, it was an invitation to reexamine what that promised nourishment looks like in the moment, knowing that it likely looks different from what I had painted in my mind with my assumption.
My intense spiritual work right now is to center a faith that is trusting in the deep truth that God is showing up in love among us, all the while releasing an attachment to assumptions about the way that is manifesting in my life. With this kind of grounded but emergent faith, I would make the same decision again to give away my last remaining eggs.
And I could even eagerly invite in the deepening of my experience and witness of God’s provision in this world, thankfully so much broader and more expansive than I could possibly imagine.