Relationships and Modest Chickens

I can’t believe it worked! We have raised chickens for years and I have never heard of this before. After a long, cold winter we expected our 23 chickens to pick up their egg laying production with the longer, warmer days of spring and summer. Well, they didn’t.

So my wife, Chris, started researching a solution to this problem. It was either do something to get those birds to start laying, or into the stew pot they’d go. We don’t need 23 extra mouths to feed if they are not going to produce food for us.

Chris was taking care of a friend’s chickens and noticed that she had curtains on her nesting boxes. When Chris asked why she had curtains on the nesting boxes her friend replied, “If I were a chicken I’d want some privacy when I was laying an egg.”

I laughed when Chris told me she was going to give it a try. I sarcastically said, “So you think we have modest chickens who will lay more if they have pretty privacy curtains on their boxes?”

She said, “What can it hurt? We aren’t getting very many eggs now without the curtains.”

I quipped, “Okay, but if the curtains don’t work it’s curtains for those birds!”

So up went the curtains, and to our surprise, up went the egg production. I guess we do have modest chickens after all.

Our modest chickens and their curtains are an example to all of us of how to relate with others. We would do well to try to put ourselves inside the head of the person we are trying to relate with. As parents, before we are too quick to judge or get upset with our children we should try to see life from their perspective. Like Chris’ friend reasoned, “If I were a chicken…” we should reason, “If I was my child in this situation, what would I be thinking?” If we do that, maybe we will be a little more understanding the next time our child does something that brings us to the edge of our sanity.

This approach also works in our relationship with our spouse. We all agree that men and women are different, yet we continue to try to figure out one another from our own point of view. If husbands would try to think like their wives a little more and wives would try to see things from a man’s perspective, we would all get along a bit better.

We may never agree with the way the other thinks, but at least we would understand why our wife is always late or our husband is more interested in watching sports than in listening to his wife share her struggles with the kids that day.

So if you are having problems understanding or relating to someone, remember our modest chickens. If you were that person, what would you like to do, what would you be thinking? Then maybe this understanding will help you proceed with actions that will help build up the relationship instead of tearing it down. It was worth the effort to give our chickens a little privacy. They got their privacy, and we get the eggs. I’d much rather have the eggs from happy chickens than chew on an old bird.

How about you? Are you getting eggs or tough old birds from your relationships? Maybe it’s time to stop seeing things from your own perspective and see things through someone else’s eyes.

Serving Christ and His family,

Pastor Ken Lawrence