The Lesson I Learned from my Chickens

Meg Herriot describes a life lesson she's learned from the flock of chickens her family keeps in the backyard.

I haven’t written much the past two years because our family has been going through a lot of changes. As I grow older, I’m definitely learning there are different seasons in life and sometimes you have to let go or set things aside, depending on what season you are in (I hope the season of moving is more like a Leap Year exception than a regular season).  

A season of change

My family has moved from a cramped townhouse where it took less than five minutes to weed-whack the yard to a property that takes four hours to mow the lawn. It has been an adjustment, for sure.  

We’ve had the joy (and hard work) of adding some animals to our household. A flock of ducks who came with the property, as well as two outdoor cats (in addition to our indoor cat). A birthday gift of what was supposed to be eight hens actually became seven hens and one rooster. “Chicken math” occurred and now our flock is at 20 (we will be winnowing it down, thankfully, chickens are popular right now). The rooster is actually the friendliest chicken of the bunch. That would be a whole other story. 

We also threw a puppy into the mix. That could be a whole blog post (or chapter book) of its own. 

Running away doesn't always help 

Occasionally in the chaos of our life though, I’ve had time to think and reflect. Like the time that there was some confusion with how to fill the chicken water in the dead of winter, and so I went out to fill it late at night when I got home from work well after dark and found a hen alone, outside of the coop and shaking with cold.

I found myself in approximately 20-degree weather, chasing this hen around the enclosure to get her into the coop. Apparently, previously in the day, something in the coop had fallen down and scared her. In her anxiety, she did not want to go back into the coop. Understandable. But if there hadn’t been a miscommunication about the water, and if I hadn’t gone to check, she would have been in worse shape — and become a frozen chicken.

This made me think about how sometimes anxiety in my life can make me run away from something, most often something unpleasant, but the Lord pushes me to confront it, in one way or the other and often with the support of community. Sometimes in trying to run away from the anxieties of the world, we often make our situation worse. Sometimes Christ, either through my personal relationship or the nudging of others in the community of the Body of Christ, has to chase me and boost me back into the safety of the coop. 

I thank the Lord that I can learn lessons from chickens, related to the dinosaurs of ancient times. I thank the Lord for all His creatures, great and small. 

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Copyright 2024 Meg Herriot
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