The Ministry of the Nest
When I was a little girl, Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman was one of my favorite books. It was a before-bed favorite from a time when I was too young to read myself. My mother loves to tell a story of how my uncle was reading it to me during a visit and I quoted the book completely from memory to the point where my uncle thought I was actually reading it.
The story goes that a baby bird hatches while his mother is away from the nest. In looking for his mother, he falls from the tree and begins to walk around asking various characters if they are his mother: a chicken, a dog, a kitten, a cow, a truck, and so on. Eventually, the baby bird makes it back to his nest just a moment before the mother returns and upon seeing her, the baby bird knows the mother bird at first sight.
Are Our Souls Neglected?
When we were living in North Carolina, there was a house down the street from us that was always a mess. There were always toys and debris all over the front lawn, junk stacked high on the porch, mattresses tossed in the backyard, a weedy garden, falling down fence, and I’m fairly certain the garage doors were broken because they were always open. Whenever we passed it, we’d grumble and complain about how the homeowner didn’t take care of the home.
If you looked past all the neglect, it would be a beautiful house. It was a log cabin build with a big, beautiful porch. With a little love and hard work, it would look like a picturesque little property. Instead we cringed, because if the outside was so overgrown and unkempt, we could only imagine what the inside looked like.
The Economics of God’s Truth
Think about an engagement ring. That is an item that is purchased for a large sum of money. And not only that, but after that initial purchase, the item gains meaning for us. Not only is it something that is purchased at a great personal, financial cost, but it’s also something that has a great deal of symbolism that heightens the value of the ring. It’s a symbol of love, of a vow, a commitment, and a covenant between two people. Those things make that ring priceless.
Now imagine, after all that intrinsic and irreplaceable value, would you suddenly turn around and sell that engagement ring at a garage sale? Probably not. A garage sale is where items of a much lesser value are sold, and no one is going to pay the price that a diamond ring is worth standing in your driveway. That would be grossly undercutting the worth of it.
The Toll Gossip Takes
“Don’t be a yente.”
That’s how my mother would scold me when I was a child and being meddlesome or a busybody. It was always a funny word that made me giggle, but the rebuke was there even if it was made in jest. ‘Yente’ is a yiddish word for a gossiper, which from what I can tell, became a more popular term from the play Fiddler on the Roof, the actual name of the matchmaker in the show that arranges the marriages for their small, Jewish village in Ukraine.
This should give you a better picture if you’re unfamiliar with the term: a yente is a meddling gossip, a known busybody, or a tale-bearer. She always has a story and always has the latest word on who’s who and what’s what.