We have undergone a new rigorous training here at Marygate. Innocently enough, it began in early March when we bought 15 little day old chicks. Fourteen of them were hens as advertised. But God saw fit to make one of them male. And is he gorgeous! Sultan, as he is known, is a very strict time keeper. Starting anywhere from four o'clock to five he begans heralding the dawn. As we stumble out of bed in the dark there is no reason to check the Eastern horizon. A few faint streaks of gray are cracking the eyelid of the sun.
There is no snooze button on the rooster alarm. Every ten seconds (I counted) Sultan crows. And he doesn't stop until someone comes out and lets him out of his coop. As I grumbled to myself the other day I wondered for the umpteenth time "why am I, with five grown children, living on a farm with roughly 30?" Why are not my husband and I traveling, taking it easy, eating out every once and a while? Why don't I have just a big yard with a dog that can easily go to a boarding house instead of scrambling for a caretaker when I must leave? Answer: I don't leave. At least not very often.
God has everything to do with it. We are privileged to have placed on us an apostolic call to serve Him and we think that this is the begining of what He wants.
Sultan had to learn his crow. At first as his feathers grew so did his confidence and his voice. He sounded like a little girl with her finger caught in the door or someone who just had ice thrown down their back.....but one day he speared me with his eye and let a "cock a doodle doo" erupt proudly.
I feel like Sultan. I am not sure what kind of feathers I am growing but I must learn my crow in fits and starts. I have to practice and fumble along trusting in what God wants us to do here. I hope and pray it will be as in Emily Dickinson's poem "to lift one fainting robin, unto his nest again - I shall not die in vain." Okay, Sultan's the one on the left b4 he got all his feathers.
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