Half our household is anticipating this Sunday morning. Here’s why… my friend Kenny is bringing us a beautiful, pure-bred, colorful, bantam rooster. Because it’s five degrees here right now (and leaving it in his truck is probably a mistake) it’ll be in my office at church during the services Sunday until we can bring it home and get it in the barn. Those of us who are excited about this are eager to get our little chicken operation up and rolling (I raised 500 chickens in high school and delivered eggs! Hickey’s Egg Farm, I’m serious… I’ll try to dig up a picture).

Come on… farm fresh eggs – what’s there to complain about? Our daughter Kaitlyn is reading up on incubating eggs. As we were discussing this, our friend Cliff (and fellow CATG poultry connoisseur) commented through a chuckle the other night over a plateful of broiled chicken that you won’t survive the end times unless you can raise chickens for your family!!

Kristen sees this all differently. She is wondering if this thing will wake her up everyday at 5 A.M.. She’s been telling everyone the story of us being woken up each day in Gaza City a few years ago by Yassar Arafat’s rooster outside our window (we stayed on his compound). She’s worried our three barn cats will gang up the the rooster. I tell her it’ll be the other way around if they mess with him and that one little confrontation and there will forever be peace in our menagerie. I’m surprised she hasn’t thought to bring up the possibility of Asian Bird Flu infecting our children. So we’ve come to a real crossroads of opinion here in our home. Are chickens a good thing or a not-so-good thing?

Now I’ll be serious… Woody Allen once said: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Let’s hope he was just trying to be funny. I’m thinking he was not. Such is the outlook of those without faith.

Faith and pessimism are like oil and water. In the moments I start struggling with pessimism, I’ve learned to realize my real problem is having little faith that God is there and will work all things out for good according to his purpose because he loves me.

For those of you still not smiling, maybe this will lighten you up…

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