A few weeks ago, I was teaching chicks how to drink. That probably makes no sense to you but baby chickens pop out of their eggs with no clue how to drink. When the hen is not in the picture, their human owner gets to fill in.
Chicks are amazingly cute little beings. There’s no room for brains in their head, but they make up for it with cuteness.
Photo by Kathy Brasby
If you’ve ever gone to the feed store with your six-year-old, you know how amazingly cute the chicks are. Six-year-olds never miss the chick cages. Once there, they unfurl all the tricks a child knows. Anything is fair here. They might scream or plead or remind you that you hadn’t bought them anything in decades, maybe centuries.
Parents: don’t trust traditional responses. Don’t tell your child, “You’re not old enough to care for this chick,” because the child will assure you that this is their chance to reveal the profound changes in their heart, character, and behavior that have emerged since breakfast when they left their cereal bowl on the table and spoon on the floor. They are changed creatures, just like that chick that just transformed from an egg to a fuzz ball.
Don’t tell your child, “We don’t have a place for any chicks,” What your child hears is “yet,” as in “We don’t have any place for any chicks yet.” They have hope! All they now need is a cardboard box, a saucer, and a bag of chicken feed.
Stay away from the chick aisle!
Amongst the research regarding chickens is the discovery that chickens wearing red-tinted contact lenses fight less, eat less, and produce more – the chicken trifecta.
Can you imagine the scientist putting contact lenses on chickens? I wonder if they were soft or hard contacts. What if a chicken lost a lens? Would she attack the hen on her right while giving sweet words to the one on her left?
Would you have to change contacts every day? Maybe mellow chickens would stand in line to get their contacts in for the day. Right after brushing their teeth and combing their hair.
If scientists could put contact lenses on chickens, you’d think researchers could find a way to teach chickens how to drink when they first pop out of the egg. Apparently not.
Chicks remain as ill-prepared for life as ever.
But back to my teaching moment. I had two dozen cute yellow fur balls wandering aimlessly in the desert of their cardboard box, about to start crawling wing over wing in the sand, lips swollen and canteens dusty. The overhead light probably looked like a huge angry sun to them.
They needed a mama to teach them how to drink water.
My son watched. “They don’t know how to drink?” he said.
“They don’t know how to find water,” I said. I dipped each chick’s beak into the water and let each one shake its head in amazement at finding water just before dying of desert exposure.
My son shifted gears. “And why did you put paper down in their pen?”
“So they wouldn’t accidentally eat the wood chips underneath. They don’t know the difference between wood chips and their feed yet.”
He stared down at the yellow wave of chick energy. “So you’re telling me that they don’t know how to eat or drink?”
“Well, I guess…..”
He headed for the door. “I’m amazed they know how to breathe.”
As we get better acquainted, you’ll know things about me that my kids may someday pay you to keep to yourself. This is a great reason to keep track of me. Think of it as retirement planning. Just fill out that email signup over there and the money may well come flowing one day. No promises, though.
Don’t you, by the way, get annoyed with promises coming at you in the mail and on your phone and email? You know what I mean. I have gotten a garden catalog in the mail for years. Most of the catalogs have a big red sticker on the front: “Warning: this may be the last catalog you will receive unless you order.” Yeah, yeah, big promises. I’ve never ordered. I’d be OK if this were the last catalog but no such luck.
I don’t make promises like that. I promise.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
I’ve had several jobs in my life, none related to the one before as far as I can tell. I’ve been a property manager for four years. Managing rental units provides endless story possibilities. That’s almost a good enough reason to keep managing.
As you can imagine, we occasionally have tenants who don’t pay their rent. This particular tenant not only got behind on his rent, but he had creative excuses. One month, he assured us that his check must have gotten stolen since we hadn’t received it.
In fact, the police had contacted him about the stolen check, and he was getting another one issued. We asked, could he send us a copy of the police report? No, since the police were in another state.
What, they hadn’t heard of faxing or email?
He did finally get that rent payment paid. It was sort of the sweet-and-sour-sauce with that tenant. One month, he was great and the next, lots of complaints and no rent.
I reported the final events to my business partner, who is also my sister, Ann, via texts:
Me: “Guess what? No rent today again.”
Ann: “Still nothing? Didn’t he promise?”
Me: “Yep.” Captain Obvious is my texting handle.
Ann: “Can’t you just email him and tell him to send us his kidney.”
I was typing, “I’m OK with a kidney,” when Ann answered, “No! Ack! Money. Not kidney. Money.”
This blog is getting a reboot. I’ve tried to be serious and grown up, but I gotta go back to my roots: stories.
I see the world in stories. I laugh at the goofiest things – and you might as well come along.
This morning, my sister, the artist, showed me a new set of paintings. “They’re about new life. Butterflies.”
Me, I am a big fan of cliches, as you’ll see. I said, “I don’t see any butterflies.”She had painted a green background with a round yellow area in what might have been the sky. It might have been irises for all I could tell. She’s an abstract painter.
So then I looked closer. I’m not sure if you are supposed to look closer with abstract work or step back but I was sitting at my computer so stepping back would have required getting up. Not sure it was worth all that.
“There are red splatters on the painting.” My mind flew to cliches because I’m a big fan of cliches. “Is this post-butterflies? What happened to the butterflies?” I started thinking of big predator birds which, by the way, weren’t anywhere in her paintings. Maybe they already flew away. I didn’t ask. I wanted to be a support like any good sister would.
So I asked her if butterflies were good symbols for new life.
“They’re safe,” she wrote me. Did I tell you we were texting on our computers? You may have figured that out from the not-getting-up-from-my-computer comment, but now you know for sure.
Anyway, my sister sometimes types goofy. What she actually sent me was “Sage.”
I almost asked her if butterflies smelled like sage, but she can get testy about her typing. So I just asked her if sage was helpful in creating abstract paintings.
Her exact words, and I’m not taking this up, were “You are such a help.”
So I’m on a quest today to find out how sage and butterflies and abstract skies combine into a new painting. I might even let you see her results. (Probably not mine, though.) Stay tuned.
Leadership happens in odd and tricky places sometimes.
I’ll bet Aaron Brantley would have been thrilled for someone be a leader as he crawled across a concrete parking lot to get help. Brantley was attacked at a busy Detroit gas station, left with a broken leg. He crawled from the gas pump to the gas station door while people drove and walked past him.
Leadership isn’t just leading others. It starts with you and ripples out. It’s about helping even if others aren’t. Leadership is doing the right thing when others are walking away. Leadership is gathering your resources and working.
I don’t mean to condemn the people who walked away. They obviously didn’t know what to do. They may have been embarrassed or busy or a little afraid. Was this a scam? Was this practical joke? Maybe they really didn’t care.
It’s clear someone needed to step up. A leader.
Leadership doesn’t spring from our brains without any preparation. We need to think ahead. We need to be intentional about goals and plans. We need to talk to others and get some training.
We need examples to help us. Especially as followers of Jesus, we want to find God’s guidance. How do I lead as a Christian? Does that look different than other leadership models?
As followers of Jesus, we often look to the Bible. We’d like to find bullet point to clarify Christian leadership. Highlighted principles would be helpful. Maybe we can find some rules of Christian leadership.
Instead, we find stories.
But stories are good. I’ve seen leadership principles pulled from stories about presidents and generals. I’ve seen leadership points gathered from a book about building a boat. Stories can teach us more than we realize.
What can stories teach us?
Real people in real situations
We’re not told proverbs but get to see the ideas in action. We learn of the emotions of people as they interact with real-life situations.
The good the bad, the ugly
The Bible doesn’t sugar coat. We’re allowed to see mistakes, wrong motives, wisdom. The people in the Bible’s stories aren’t perfect but they have the opportunity to learn. And we can learn along with them.
The context for courage
Would you rather be told “take courage” or be told the story of a person who overcame great difficulty to succeed? Courage is more nuanced than it seems. We can get away from platitudes to real-life scenarios.
Heart of the leader illustrated
Stories bring emotion and depth. We walk with the people, hear their fears and concerns, and understand better how a leader interacts with those they lead.
Engaging
We can hang with a story longer. It has conflict, people, setting, a plot. It’s much more interesting than the bullet points we thought we craved.
Fleshed out truth
Not all principles can be put in a proverb or cliche. Stories help us see the truth in its dimensions and layers.
Mistakes managed
Leaders aren’t invincible heroes. They make mistakes. Sometimes the leader in a story figures out the error. Sometimes God corrects them. Often we see it coming, sometimes before the main character does.
The beauty of human relationships
The interaction between people always enriches leadership principles. We don’t lead in a vacuum. Or we shouldn’t. Stories illustrate that beautifully.
Long before Pinterest could puncture our creative bubble, there was the nativity Christmas cookie cutter set.
I sometimes call Pinterest the dream site: I can only do those projects in my dreams.
The cookie cutter set was like that. The box seduced me with photos of beautiful cookies in the shape of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger. A little piping of frosting, a few sparkles in the right place and we would have a unique nativity set.
And the best part was that we could do this project as a family with everyone helping.
I bought the set.
Yes, I knew we wouldn’t get the cookies quite as perfect as the photos. We had a two-year-old at the time. He’d produce a cute but goofy little cookie.
It was OK.
I forgot to factor in his mother.
I knew we were in trouble when I pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven. Baby Jesus in the manger resembled a toasted marshmallow.
The sheep – and I’d made lots of them – all were blimps. Some had short fat legs but, since you couldn’t tell where the head was, the legs could have been porcupine prickles, too.
The camels’ longer legs had grown together while baking. “Is this a tree?” asked the six-year-old.
The shepherds had morphed into tall planks of wood and kneeling Joseph was now a giant S.
The kids were game, anyway. They slathered on frosting that was too thin so that the blues and oranges dribbled into each other making a muddy brown on the kings.
Well, I thought those were the kings because of the lumps at the top which I identified as crowns. Maybe they were cows, in which case the muddy brown frosting might make more sense.
I had planned to assemble the stable printed on the back of the box but tossed that after our older son frosted an angel as though it were a donkey. I couldn’t see displaying these.
When we were done, with sticky frosting on our fingers and sparkles drifting to the floor, I studied the blobs of cookies. “Well, this didn’t work out quite like I had hoped.”
My husband surveyed the table, surrounded by sets of eager young eyes, and picked up a cookie. “Then we’d better destroy the evidence.”
I had just finished rinsing the shampoo out of my hair when my cell phone rang. I grabbed a towel. Who was calling?
My sister.
“Cover your eyes,” I said, draping myself with the towel. Water ran down my face.
She hung up.
Should I call her back? Should I dry myself off first?
The phone rang again. It was my sister again. Oh, good, she’d accidentally hung up.
As I pushed the accept button, I noticed that she had used FaceTime this time.
Facetime is a video phone call.
Well, it was my sister and she only had to see my dripping hair.
“Why are you FaceTiming me?” I have a knack for insightful questions.
“I wanted you to see my new tooth.” She’d just gotten an implant and so she stretched her mouth to reveal the bright tooth.
And then she started giggling. “Where are you?”
She tried to be polite. She really did. But her tale about the trip to the dentist and her report on her plans for her day were interrupted by snorts and chuckles.
When the techies worked on the chips and circuits that would allow us to combine phone calls with video, I think they had images of salesmen using charts to illustrate quarterly earnings. Or giggling babies reaching out to touch their grandmother who lived across the country. Or a soldier connecting with his wife and kids from a foreign country.
And I’ll bet all those things happen.
But I wonder if their vision ever included new teeth and dripping hair.
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