the power of pipping

It is with great and somewhat affected pride that I announce an announcement.  The eggs are pipping.  Silas, Chicken Whisperer burst through the bedroom door this morning while we were pretending to sleep. "They're Pipping!"  he cried, grinning as only a chickeny kind of boy can.

Pipping is the kind of like when labour starts, only different.  Firstly, there is no mama involved at this point.  Second, nobody has to call the midwife.  Thirdly, nobody says, oh, is mama going to be yelling soon?  And one other thing.  Sparky does not panic.  Only the chicken boys do.  But it’s good practice for when they are older.

Pipping is when the little chick inside the egg, after a mere eighteen or nineteen days, starts pecking the inside of its egg to get out.  Over the next day or so, it will make a little hole, then start to peck all the way around inside the egg until it can kick and push its way out.

You can hear it beeping inside the egg, before it even makes the hole.

Now this.  It may only be a chicken.  You may eat it or you may eat its by-products.  You may despise it for its stupidness, you may think of it as fodder for some larger animal.  But, oh the wonder a baby animal renders in the human heart.  To think that even the hardened human heart looks at baby animals, the silly lambs in the farms near the manor, and the chicks and the kittens and the ducklings, even the most hardened of hearts, are made fragile at the sight of baby animals.

Is it not a wonder that in the spring, in this Lenten season, preparing for Easter that our hearts are made more tender?  That God has reason for us to feel the happiness of spring, new buds and new babies, the expectation of what is to be?  That there is more?

He calls us to Himself. He makes the human heart ready for wonder, mystery and awe.