Global Faith Ministries of Chiism

The Chick is Born

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything that happens, happens for a reason, most times for our own good.

Every crack is an opening.

 

Change is in the air. A vital occurrence for our survival. To some such talk is anti the sense of what we have accepted as truth and spiritual demagoguery, mythical ethereal spiritual comfort, as true connection to God. To accept anything else represents a frightening thought, an exposure through torn garments that cease to cover our nakedness. But such nakedness must occur so that we may begin to cloak ourselves in new garments.

I am reminded of what mark Nepo describes that happens to a chick as it is being born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all it's food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever shrinking space of its world.

Finally it's own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. It's sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat it's shell. In that moment-growing but fragile, starving and cramped, it's world breaking- the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It does'nt die, but falls into the world.

The lesson is profound. Transformation always involves the falling away of things we relied on, and we are left with a feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is.

Yet the chick offers us the wisdom that the way to be born while still alive is to eat our own shell. When faced with great change- in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling, in spiritual truth, we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, incubated us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is within us.

We as Africans have been incubated in a cramped spiritual shell, a sort of mental interlude that have kept us sequestered, suffocating in a minute space that impedes true growth, an opening that fails to accord us the opportunity to become all that we can be. Yet like the chick, we must break out and grow. We must see our world not from a cramped space and an infidel state of mind, rejecting our spiritual truth and saddled with an indoctrinated belief sytem interlaced with self hatred and rejection. We must rise up and reach out to all the possibilities available to us. Its time to grow. That is what God expects of us, that is the only answer for Africa's freedom and growth. Though we may resist it and make excuses why we must remain in our shell, we must crack the shell and move beyond our limitations to truly discover the goodness and presence of Chineke.
 

The next chance that you get, watch something being born.

If moved by this motion, actively pursue this.

Go to a zoo, a farm, a nursery, an aquarium or walk on the floor of new births in your local hospital.

As you witness birth of some kind, note what detail touches you.

Take it as a teacher and see if it describes something struggling to be born in you.

Become born again. Only this time, be born in your true self and embrace all it entails.

May the power of Chineke energize you and create the crack in your shell so that the new you shall emerge.

Yagazie!

Ogele.