BROODING COMES BEFORE HATCHING
How we are sometimes like hens.
Hovering and brooding can be seen as similar activities. Brooding implies more than simply sitting on your thoughts; it is also about being intentional, though to all outward appearances, you might seem inactive.
My life is like that right now: I am brooding over thoughts, ideas, and projects. Brooding is essential for successful hatching. Without brooding, ideas will grow cold, and plans will fail to incubate; nothing will emerge from the darkness.
Any day now, my little chicks will start bursting out of their metaphoric shells. My job is to ensure my readiness to raise them to maturity when they finally “arrive.”
Brooding seems like a monumental task to me. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I remember the Holy Spirit brooding or hovering over the face of the deep waters before everything on the earth was formed.
“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:2
God has placed His Divine spark within us. It is our nature to create things because He made us in His image. It is awe-inspiring to partake in creation, even if our little piece of it seems inconsequential or unsubstantial by comparison.
Suppose we have allowed Him to breathe His breath into us. To be fully submitted to God is to place ourselves in a position to receive inspiration from Him. We become pregnant with ideas, thoughts, and plans. As the intangible transitions to the tangible, we sit on a nest full of unrealized potential. So we brood and hover until the time is right and our nest is full of hatchlings.
To partner with God is to realize that we don’t have everything necessary to make a plan prosper without Him. We accept He is our Senior Partner; it is humbling, and we are honored to be His companions in this excellent creation process. It also means that once the eggs hatch, we don’t scoop them up and run off with a quick “let’s do lunch,” cutting God out of our plans because we think we can “take it from here.”
It is a glory and a joy to be invited to be part of creating things. I hope that as things progress, I never want to tell God, “let’s do lunch,” but that I will wait on Him through each stage of the journey.
For a healthy flock, brooding comes before hatching, but all the intentional waiting pays off when hatching day comes.
Pastora Cate Covert