The female duck hissed and darted her open beak toward me. I was trying to get past her to get hay for the horses but she didn’t want anyone or anything near her. She had been sitting on a clutch of eggs for some time and it wasn’t doing much for her disposition. The worst thing about it was, that after all this time, we knew that the eggs were not going to hatch. She was wasting her time.
We have had this happen before to some of our hens. After I see that nothing is going to hatch, I take the rotten eggs away so that the hen can go back to a more productive life. They usually wander around disconsolately for a day or so, then they get over it.
When I see them spend so much time and place such importance on a futile endeavor, I feel sorry for them. But it always makes me think about the infertile eggs in our own lives — things that seem important to us but are completely fruitless, costly and time-consuming parts of our lives that don’t amount to anything in the final analysis. I’m afraid that we all have a clutch of them. We need to take a close look at our daily habits and see if some of them should be thrown out so that we can get on with a more productive life.
“Be very careful, then, how you live — not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” Ephesians 5:15-16.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One