Ask any of my relatives, and they’ll tell you that my sending of birthday wishes usually begins after the event itself. I was a little busy yesterday, and I didn’t make time to mark the birthday of The Plucked Chicken. It all began on April Fool’s Day, 2006. At the time, I wondered if it would last to the next day, or become another short-lived, bad joke. The jury is still out on the joke thing, but at least we know the chicken survived a whole year. Maybe it even sprouted a feather or two.
As I write, not counting this entry, there have been exactly 100 entries posted. Wow. If that had been a goal, I wouldn’t have made it. Even more interesting for me to see is that we’ve had 77 comments published, and 111 comments filed. That’s right, only 111. I was a little concerned at first about dealing with comment spam, but it seems to have abated. The anti-spam facilities of Serendipity have helped greatly.
I wish there had been more opportunity for me to write about things that really interest me, rather than the need to address a few things by necessity. Nobody likes constant negativity, and sometimes I’d like a break from the “bad news.”
Yet this experience has taught me, or re-taught me an important lesson. It’s foolhardy to place our trust in man, or in man-made institutions, or man-made teachings, or man-made anything. If you do, you will always be disappointed. However, if you place your trust in God, “Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases, Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, Who satisfies your mouth with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” …. if you place your trust in Him, according to His Word, then He’ll take care of you in some wonderful and maybe surprising way.
A corollary of this is that news about man and his works will usually be “bad news,” while news about God and His works will usually — or always — be “good news.”
Someone may wonder where I get the time for 100 posts in a year. If you find out, please tell me. You’d think that posting to a blog would negatively affect my sermon-writing, or something like that. The interesting thing is that the roughest sermon writing I’ve had over the last year happened last week. Now, have a look at how many posts were written that week. Go ahead, it’s on the blog calendar. Well, I’ll just give you the answer: none. So it wasn’t The Plucked Chicken, but other factors that you probably can’t even guess. But I’ll mention something tangentially related, for benefit of one of the Chicken’s normal readers. The congregations I serve decided they would submit two memorials to the 2007 convention.
Well, here’s to a year of featherless poultry!