Does a Chick Need Help?

My daughter Grace has had one thing on her mind since I caved in to her constant, pathetic, and adorable pleas; chickens! She has been asking me for a horse, a goat, cows, and of course chickens. I figured that at least chickens would be simple enough for her to take care of on her own. The begging begins every spring thanks to TSC, for having the baby chick display. Thankfully, I was able to skirt the raising of chicks. My cousin has several egg laying birds and offered to part with 3 of them so Grace could have herself 3 producers right off the bat. She named them Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Of course, before we could pick up these feathered beauties, we had to build them a home. It only took us 3 days to design and build a mobile chicken tractor. So much for Grace doing the chicken thing on her own. As much as it has been extra work for me, it has been a really good learning project for her. Hopefully, now she should be able to care for these birds on her own without much help from her father.

This whole thing reminds me of a story that I heard about a little boy that was incubating eggs to hatch into chicks. Each day he would watch for the eggs to change until finally the first egg would show a crack as the chick was beginning to break out of its shell. He was so excited that he wanted to peel away the rest of the shell to help the little chick to get out faster. If he did that, that little chick didn’t go through the struggle of breaking out of its shell and it would likely die because it would not have been fully developed to survive in the outside world on its own. You see the struggle that the chick goes through to break out of its shell is a necessary part of its final development. As simple and insignificant as it may seem, without it, life becomes almost certain death.

How many times do we look to over-ride the natural course of a process in order to meet our agenda or desires? Today more than ever we are looking for new ways to avoid struggle, stay out of conflict, avoid pain and chose the path of least resistance. This reminds me of the quote “The path of least resistance makes rivers and men crooked.” Hard work is perfectly defined. It is both hard and it takes work. It is very rare in life that something worth while happens without struggle, sacrifice, and focused application of effort toward a desired outcome.

All we have to do is look at the example of the chick, and we can see that God designed struggle into the equation of life. Some other examples that I can think of are the struggle that salmon go through just to reproduce, a tree become stronger when it is exposed to a prevailing wind its whole life, after the Great Depression and WWII came the greatest economic boom this country has ever seen. Instead of looking to avoid it, complain about it, or give up when the struggle gets tough, how about leaning into it. How about asking what is God trying to show me, or teach me here? I certainly know that I have had many lessons in life that involved struggle that I had to relearn over and over until I finally changed the pattern of the way I was living.

The intent of this message is to encourage you to not give up or give in when things become difficult. I bet if you look back in your life you probably remember a time of struggle that even though it was tough, as time passed it brought new opportunities, new relationships, or even something better than what you had before.

Working with the public I have the opportunity to see people in all stages of life. It is common to see as people get to the later part of life that they don’t seem to handle change as well, and seem to want things to stay the same. They become less and less willing or able to adapt to change. This is because adaptability is a function of the efficiency of our nervous system. Our nervous system is the controlling and regulating system of our body. As one’s adaptability declines, so does one’s health. The ability to adapt is an innate function, much like the chick knowing how to break out of its shell. Chiropractic care has always been about removing interference to your innate functions.

Lombardi Chiropractic Family Health Center

1116 Upper Lenox Ave. www.lombardichiropractic.com (315) 363-4114