God’s brooding work

Last updated on: April 5, 2017 at 10:35 am by Brad Roth

God’s brooding work 2017-04-05T10:35:16-05:00 Brad Roth

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Little Miss Broody

One of our hens has gone broody. That means that she has the urgent biological need to sit on eggs. We don’t have a rooster, so as it is her eggs would never hatch. But that hasn’t kept her from sitting motionless, all day, on a clutch of eggs. She plucked her breast feathers out to expose a warm patch of skin and has generally become tetchy and bad company. She’s broody. Some friends gave us a couple of eggs fertilized courtesy of their one-eyed rooster, and we swapped those eggs for our little hen’s unfertilized ones. Watch this space on or about April 2. There may be chicks. [Update here!]

Brooding eggs takes time: twenty-one days. You can’t speed it up by turning up the heat. The life inside those eggs has to develop slowly, according to its own logic and schedule. Fine blood vessels vein along the inside of the shell. A heart coalesces. It beats. Organs bud. Liquid yolk turns to bone and skin and down. Eyes slit open. Tiny claws flex. And then, when it’s just the right time, the beak, armed with the special egg tooth, punctures the shell to form a “pip”–the chick’s air hole. And then the chick is out and alive. There’s no rushing it. We just have to wait.

Might this be a sign for Lent? You see, Lent makes us wait. Lent confronts our need for resolution. If we’re truly living the meaning of Lent, we’re learning to let God do what God needs to do in us on God’s own time.

I like to believe that what God’s doing in us during the times of waiting is something grand, some transformative work that will pop up all new and fresh and crocus-y. But I have the suspicion that most of the time, what God’s doing in us is something far simpler and sublter: God is laboring at the ongoing, nonlinear, frustratingly slow work of developing the life of Christ within us. It’s not so much something brand new as something re-newed. It’s becoming who God intended us to be.

We would probably prefer God to create something brand new within us. Most of us are carrying around enough gunk and junk that we’d rather just chuck it all and start over. Tada! A new me. We cite Scripture to justify our hope. Paul said that anyone in Christ is a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). In Isaiah, God said that he was doing a “new thing” (Isaiah 43:19).

But we’ve misunderstood these passages. God isn’t in the business of soul transplants. The new creation is the transfiguration of our lives so that we are transparent to God, just as Jesus was. The new creation is a return to God’s original intent in creation. The idea that we can leave it all behind and become something new strikes me as too psychologically convenient, something that has less to do with the gospel than with the American myth of self-transformation and our culture’s infatuation with fresh starts.

I wonder if, most of the time, what God is doing in us is more like what’s happening in those eggs. If all goes well, what emerges from the secret transformation of the egg, delicately enveloped in the slow heat of the hen’s brood patch, will not be something never before seen. It will be chicks. They will peck their way out into the bright world in all their glorious chickenness.

The life of Christ budding within us restores us to our glorious as-God-intended-it humanness.

This transformation requires worship. It requires prayer. It requires the Word to vein down into our innermost being. But transformation especially requires the slow soul-heat of attentive waiting. There’s no rushing it.

That’s God’s brooding work.

Previous Post

March 27, 2017

On planting onions

Next Post

April 4, 2017 Fragility and the cross

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month January 2023 November 2022 May 2022 April 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 April 2021 March 2021 December 2020 November 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which Old Testament book does not mention God?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Song of Solomon Esther Ruth Ecclesiastes

Books by This Author Books by Brad Roth

See All Titles »