Counting Chickens

My Southern roots have afforded me with a storehouse of old sayings, cliches and country wit.  I'm "fine as frog's hair" when things are going just fine - I might be "fine as frog's hair, split nine ways and sanded, if things are really fine.  I "don't cry over spilt milk," I set the bucket up and keep milking.  When I'm completely out of my elementt, "I'm as nervous as a long-tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs."  And, when it comes to future events, "I don't count my chickens until the eggs are hatched."

On the farm, eggs hold the promise of hatching into chickens but that outcome is not promised.  Say again?  Eggs, if properly fertilized, adequately protected and having no anomolies to prevent hatching, will produce chickens.  But hatching is definitely an if/then reality.  If everything goes right, then the eggs will hatch.  If not, then scramble, fry, boil or poach what might have been.

So, the life lesson on counting chickens before the eggs are hatched is that we cannot know the futrue, that even, as investment firms are required to warn, past performance is not assurance of future outcomes.  Since we cannot control all the variables in life, we cannot control its outcomes.  We can only predict the future we can control, to the degree that we can control it.  And no man, woman or child can control absolutely control it, only impact it.

James puts it this way, "Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow..." (4:13-14).  You may have all kinds of plans for tomorrow, but they may all go south.  You may not even be here tomorrow.  Predicting the future is not in your purview.

However, it is in God's control.  He can count the chickens that are going to hatch because he can control the varibles to make them hatch.  He can predict the future because he can propell the present on any trajectory he wishes, which is why James added, "Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that'" (v. 15).

No, we cannot guarantee or predict the futre with full assurance, but God can.  And while my plans may be thwarted and come to ruin, God's plans will not.  That is why, although I cannot predict even what tomorrow might bring, I can know that God will provide.  I can even know what eternity has in store for me for God's promises are certain.  I cannot know what the future may hold but I know who holds my future.  In God I trust, knowing that the chickens he counts out for me are already hatching. Jus' Say'n.