By Pastor Leah Fintel Krotz, Trinity Lutheran Church, Bruning
It has been wonderful to enjoy some weather that actually feels like spring, hasn’t it? Even though everything is still brown and we can expect quite a few nights of freezing temperatures yet, the warm sun, honking geese overhead, and baby calves and lambs being born mean that spring is finally around the corner.
When our son, James, was very young, he begged to raise some chickens. Since Rick and I both grew up on farms where chickens were always around, we decided this would be a great learning experience for our kids. We had so much fun as a family, going through the Murry McMurry Hatchery catalog every spring, deciding on which chicks to order. One year, James even convinced us to try the “Homesteader Special,” which consisted of a mixture of chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys. That was an adventure!
It was an exciting day when the call came from the local post office. “We have a package here for you, and it’s pretty noisy!” We would head into town to pick up the tiny, day-old chicks, packed tightly into a small cardboard box. As soon as we got home, we dipped their beaks in water to teach them to drink and settled them into the brooder house under a cozy heat lamp.
We had to care for the chicks, since there was no mother hen to do it. But when I was growing up, we occasionally raised our own chicks. Every mother hen was very protective of her brood, sheltering them under her wings, ready to give her own life, if need be, to protect her little ones.
Did you know that Jesus feels the same way about you? In Luke 13:34, he says, “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Like a mother hen puts the welfare of her chicks above her own safety, so Jesus put our good above his own. He faced suffering and death for our sakes, and for the sake of this whole broken world, even though many reject him. Jesus chose to go to the fox so that we—his chicks—would be saved. We are blessed.
