decapitated

The first time it happened, I found Sam—a unisex name since we were uncertain if the chick would turn out to be a rooster or a hen—face down, wings outstretched, the other babies carrying on scratching and pecking and fluttering as though their yellow sibling was not stiff in the pine shavings right next to them. The loss was not unexpected; Sam had developed pasty butt, which is exactly what it sounds like, and I had attempted to rescue the little chick by washing its rear end (to clear the paste) and then using a hair dryer to keep it warm afterward. My efforts were not enough, and I was glad that I was the one to find Sam. The chicks were still young enough to be in our kitchen, huddled under the heat lamp.

A few months later, we traveled out of the country. The chickens were old enough by then to live outdoors, and it was June. Warm, safe. They were contained in a coop and a run.

We came back to the States to find six much larger pullets puttering around. Different breed, too. In our absence, a raccoon had scrabbled under the fence and taken our six chickens. My dad cleaned up the mess, reinforced the fence, and replaced our dead birds with a new flock. But there was a stump inside the run stained with blood.

Later, more were lost; a few simply vanished, leaving feathers in their wake after a struggle with a hawk. One died, egg-bound; she was in the nesting box when I found her, a strange gray wobbly lump tucked under her body.

Last week, I went to let out the chickens. Instead of six hens racing by my feet to rake up leaves and tear up the yard, I only counted five. And then I saw the sixth, in the corner of the run. Headless, and oddly bloodless, too. It was raining. I shoveled her body over the side of the fence for the vultures and the coyotes to clean up. Perhaps the night before, we’d waited too long to close them up. Maybe a raccoon had sneaked into the coop before Timothy shut the gate. I’m glad we only lost one.

At a women’s conference recently, the speaker mentioned Instagram and all the women documenting backyard chickens and sourdough baking.

I keep chickens and I bake sourdough, but I don’t use Instagram. What would go there, if I did? Only the pictures, I suppose, of live hens happily pecking at watermelon rinds or wriggling in the sun-baked soil. Loaves sliced in half, up-close shots of crust and crumb, or maybe bowls left to rise, draped in pretty pastel linen tea towels, in slanting dusk-light. I don’t know.

In my house, there are headless hens in the coop, a sad levain that deflated before I got around to mixing the dough, a Ziploc bag of uneaten crusts tossed in the freezer. There are heaps of poop in the bedding, flies in the run, spilled feed and a litany of spiders in the coop storage. A feather has blown around the half bath for at least a week, a testament to how long it’s been since I cleaned the floors, and who knows how it flew in there in the first place. There are dishes that weren’t washed soon enough after feeding the starter, and now they’re crusted with the unyielding dried-up sourdough concoction that won’t come off in the dishwasher.

I’m no tradwife. I love beauty, but it is elusive and fleeting, and instead of a vase of lovely flowers perfuming the kitchen, there is usually a mason jar of stinky water, moldy stems, dead blooms, and pollen dust smearing the countertops.

There is beauty in the world because God made it, but there is also death and decay. There are women presenting a certain kind of lifestyle on Instagram, but there are countless others who are actually living it. Reality is complex; social media is curated. But lumping us all into the same category—me, shoveling dead chickens; the aproned women online with bone-white farmhouse sinks—isn’t helpful, either.

The reality is that the world is deadly whether you are a chicken or a tradwife, and temptation is real whether you are aware of it or oblivious, and suffering will come whether you are prepared or hopelessly optimistic.

The reality is that my chicken lost her head because we live in a world populated with raccoons, but also because we were slack in protecting our flock. We shut the gate eventually, but not soon enough. The sun had already set, but we hadn’t gone to bed yet. There was only a sliver of time when the sky was dark and the chickens exposed, but this was not the first time we’d been slow to close their coop and they’d survived thus far. We knew there were threats—we’d lost hens before, remember—but they were distant, unmaterialized, vague.

After his baptism, Jesus disappeared into the wilderness for forty days. I’ve heard the story often enough. He defeats temptation because we couldn’t; the Israelites wandered for forty years but Jesus wins after forty days. Temptation is real, of course, but it’s not that big of a problem for me, because of Jesus. I’m in him, he’s abiding in me, so whatever temptation I face is as amorphous and potential as the threats in the shadowed backyard. Sure, there is the possibility that I’ll be tempted, but there’s no reason to race down the hill to slam the door shut. No cause for alarm; all threats to my faith are merely possible, not probable.

I think it is easy to forget that while Jesus did face temptation and emerge victorious, he faced a real challenge. This is not a clever story to compare our Savior with Israel. It is not a fable, it is not a lesson. This is not something made-up. There is a real man who went into a real wilderness and faced a real temptation.

Why would I ever think that the temptation I face will be muffled, sluggish, or sloppy?

Why would I ever think my chickens are safe when the blood is still on the stump? When I can close my eyes and recall the smell of decay, or the weight in the shovel, or see the ocean of maggots roiling underneath the corpse? Why would I ever think I could wait to shut the door when I’ve seen what happens?

Because I forget that the temptation account occurred in history, here, in this world, on this earth. I forget that temptation is very real, very near, and unconcerned with my timing. I am as slack to protect my flock as I am to protect my heart or my head. The armor of God makes for a good section of Scripture to teach my children, but I’ve grown out of the need to remember it myself. My battles are so much more sophisticated now, you know. Anxiety and perfectionism; these are the wars I am embroiled in. Where is the temptation there? Where is the threat? Where is the external enemy? Where, even, is the sin? Where is the need for repentance, for forgiveness?

Fearless living is unrealistic. We should live in fear, but of the Lord, not of death.[1] Temptation is real, but there is always a way out.[2] We are more than conquerors through him who loved us,[3] and we are prisoners to the law of sin in parts of our body.[4] We are both sinner and saint, in spirit and flesh, dead and alive, citizens of a kingdom that is already here but also not yet.

Keeping chickens may be fodder for influencers, but it is life-and-death in the backyard for the rest of us.

[1] Matt 10:28

[2] 1 Cor 10:13

[3] Rom 8:37

[4] Rom 7:23