Chicken and the Ordinary

Painted with a digital pen on my 8-inch tablet.

          Birds are some of the most beautiful of God's creations.  I grew up wanting to own an eagle, a hawk, an owl or a cockatoo.

          Growing up, chicken were only good for food or for cock fighting.  They were never as magnificent as hawks and eagles nor as bright and colorful as most exotic birds.  I never considered chicken for their physical beauty.   Like Filipino "askal" dogs, I always considered them brown, ordinary and useful.

           I always knew ordinary things can be of extraordinary value and be sources of extraordinary joy, but chicken, well they are just chicken.  They are all the same wherever you go, mindlessly pecking in their uniform brown and black feathers.

          Over a year after my wife and I started keeping chicken for eggs, I began to see their beauty.  I started to see beyond the ordinary browns and blacks that gave way to deep blues, golden yellows and crimson red.

          Like most things in life, they can only be as magnificent as our prejudiced eyes or preconceptions allow us to see.  Joy and peace will never reach our hearts when we keep straining our eyes on the other side of the fence.  In the meantime -- a seemingly infinite meantime -- we miss out on the beauty that God has been consistently bestowing.