Distribution of Resources

 I had some stale bread, so of course I wanted to give it to the chickens. Bread is one of their favorite snacks.

But it's not unusual for the chickens to fight over their snacks. I guess that some of that is part of the natural order of things, establishing their pecking order and all that, but it still makes me uncomfortable. So I cut the bread into long thin strips.

I got maybe a dozen strips out of each slice of bread. "There. Now they won't have to fight over it. There's enough here for everyone!" Boy was I mistaken.

I walked up to their gate and they all gathered around, as usual. And I tossed the plate of bread strips into their midst, expecting them to share the wealth. Boy was I mistaken.

One of them grabbed a piece of bread and ran off to a far corner of the chicken yard with it. I expected that the others would just grab their own piece of bread, maybe run off with it. But no. When one had a bit of bread and ran off, the others ran after it, trying to snatch a bite of her bread for themselves. They left the pile of bread sitting unattended.

I muttered and grumbled and took their names in vain.

And I heard Father chuckle. Aha! A clue! That usually means there's a lesson for me there.

As I reflected on the gallinaceous lesson before me, one chicken came back and grabbed one piece of bread and ran off with it, with the rest of the girls chasing after her for a share of the wealth.

I could hear Father's smile, as he watched me working my way through the drama, learning to see it as he saw it.

In times past, I've learned lessons about how we humans interact from watching the chickens in their interactions, and it happened again. I recognized that we do what the chickens were doing.

When someone among us gets a bit of a revelation about something, the rest of us often enough go running after them in order to get a bite of what they've found. When God began speaking to his kids about prophetic gifts being for the Church today, we quickly had dozens, maybe hundreds of conferences about prophecy and how to prophesy. Books were written, podcasts jumped oneo that gravy train.

But there weren't a lot of us (and I'm as guilty as anyone) who came back to the Giver and asked for our own bit of revelation.

The same thing happened when God began talking about healing. We followed the few folks in social media who were actually doing the stuff, but not a lot of folks headed out to the streets to do the stuff; a whole lot more went to the conferences, the healing meetings, the YouTube channels, like chickens trying to steal a bite from the one with the bit of bread.

I see that in the world, too. When it was announced that the companies that Elon Musk had poured his money and his energy into had increased in value, making him a "trillionaire" on paper briefly, people ran after him, some declaring how unfair it was that he had so much money when people were starving, others telling their followers how we can learn from his success.

But not too many people have been pouring their money and their energy into something (a business? a job? a ministry?) that could produce a worthwhile return for their efforts. ("Your mina has made five minas more, Lord.") 

It is *absolutely* not a universal thing. There are some folks coming back to the bread pile for their own piece of bread (and some of them are having others running after them, criticizing them, trying to get their own bite of it).

But in general, it seems more normal for people to run after someone who's found some success than to come back to the Source for their own success.

People are smarter than chickens. Sometimes.