We Are God’s Chickens

As many of you long-time followers know, I am a proud and loving chicken owner.

This expression obviously says pride and love, not dithering insanity.

Today, my best friend and fellow (though definitely less crazy) chicken lady, Eenie, started telling me her theory as to why God is kinda like a chicken owner. Why?

Well, let’s start with why I keep chickens. They’re my babies. Some of them, I’ve raised since they were inside eggs layed by hens that I also raised from infancy. They each have wonderful personalities, and can be sweet and loving, or flighty and scared. They’re stubborn, beautiful, each one unique and different and fun. They do minimal things to help me, but in the end, I keep them not because of the eggs they lay, but because I love them.

So how is that like God? Well, let’s think about this. God doesn’t need us. He’s totally and perfectly complete in Himself. But still, He has us, because He loves us. He sees our beauty and our uniqueness, the way each of us is different in what we like and how we act, and He loves us for it. He even used the analogy Himself, in Matthew 23:37, “…how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

And we are definitely like chickens sometimes. Take the noble broody hen, for instance. It doesn’t matter if going broody and sitting on eggs is bad for her, if the season is wrong or she’s just not strong enough for what she wants to do, she will stubbornly stick to her plan and what she wants to do. No matter how much the hen may protest, the owner needs to gently but firmly break the bad broody habit so the hen can be healthy and happy in the long run (sound familiar?) Or think of all the ways that chickens fight, pulling each others’ feathers, even killing each other sometimes! They can be quite cantankerous, those chickens. Escaping the safety of the coop, messing with dangerous animals, chickens are independent buggers, and us humans are really no different.

Except maybe less fluffy

But there goes God, day after day, protecting us and loving us and making sure we’re the best us we can be, even when we don’t particularly like Him. All those days when we fly up into trees or sitting on a bunch of eggs we aren’t supposed to be hatching, God is patiently rescuing us from ourselves and healing the wounds we inflict on ourselves and others, never loving us any less for the sake of our wanton stupidity. He’s the kind of God who would walk into a freezing night to check on us, cover us with extra warm straw, making sure we’re protected from the cold.

So, for those of us who are tired of the analogy of being sheep, why don’t we spend a while recognizing our inherent chickenness? If that mental image makes you laugh, it should, my fine feathered friends. The idea of God being like me, with a bumper sticker on his car (fiery chariot?) that says “chillin with my peeps,” is hilarious.

Yes, this is on my car. 

But hey, that’s what God does. He’s a God of almost silly love, love that doesn’t really make sense given how unloveable His beloveds can be, but still inexplicably and infinitely exists.

Weird poultry analogy over.

Love to all!

-Tani

The Problem of Plus-Size

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Catholic tomfoolery to bring you a short rant from the writer of this, your favorite blog. Why? Because this writer is getting sick and tired of the double standards of clothing these days, and how clothing companies see “plus-sized” women.

Let’s start with the fact that yes, I’m kinda chubby. I’m about a size 16-18, depending on brand, and I’m 5 feet, 11 inches tall. That doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, really. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten used to my size, though not entirely proud of it as some people manage to be. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome prevents me from any useful amounts of exercise, so I focus on eating healthy, appropriately-portioned food and sustaining, if not slowly losing, my weight. I still manage to have friends who love me, family who love me, hobbies and responsibilities and talents like any other person. I am a confident, competent, happy person who also happens to like dressing up.

Sadly, it seems as though I’m a unicorn in the eyes of the fashion industry. A plus-sized woman with actual confidence in herself? That’s nigh unthinkable. We all know that all plus sized women (and their clothes!) fall into two categories at the extreme opposites of a spectrum.

The Nobody-Look-At-Me

This woman is fat and therefore terrified of her body. So she must hide it at all costs. How do we cater to that? We provide shapeless, rectangular clothes that mask every curve, every inch of her body. There is no flattery here, just concealment. This starts even in the lower sizes, in the tens and twelves, which are completely natural sizes for healthy women. But in sizes sixteen and above, it just gets worse and worse. Obviously, being overweight, or even just having curves and being otherwise healthy, is such a shameful thing that the poor woman must just want to melt into the background in shapeless, bland clothing. Go to any major clothing store (I have the most experience with Khols and Sears) and you’ll find racks and racks of shapeless, formless, frumpy clothes that tell women they should be ashamed of their bodies.

The Everyone-Look-At-Me

Here is the other extreme. Clothes for this woman are sexy almost to the point of the obscene. Plunging necklines, tight skirts and pants that leave nothing to the imagination, loud colors and prints that scream for attention. This woman operates under the delusion that being sexy is the same as being confident, that having her breasts popping out of her top equates to her being poised and self-reliant. Corset tops push up and leggings stick to every line, proclaiming pride in every curve. But is that really confidence? Or is that just hiding behind another mask? A mask that proclaims that sexiness is this woman’s only asset, that her brain and her talents are meaningless because her curves, and only her curves, validate her value as a person. She is and must be the center of attention because of her size. Again, go to any clothing store, and there will be racks of these clothes.

So what do we need?

We need clothes that fit. Please. Fashion industry workers, give us jeans that neither leave us swimming in fabric, nor cling to us so tightly that we can’t do the work that jeans were made for. Give us tops that are work-appropriate, that don’t cover us in a mess of mauve and don’t force us to flash our coworkers when we drop a pen. Give us casual clothes that are cut to fit us, not hide or overexpose us. Design clothes for real women and their needs, not what you think women are and want. Cause this woman, for one, is really tired of the exhaustion it takes to find clothes, and I’d bet a lot of other gals are, too.

From the coziness of the actually fitting capris that took weeks to find (and don’t get me started on finding long pants) –

Love to all!

-Tani