Today’s question: HOW IS THE PACE OF YOUR LIFE?

This is Day 25 of the 5-week Lenten journey with The Society of Saint John the Evangelist and their daily meditation on TIME.

See Br. James Koester on the video (2:51) below, or to leave comments on the Brothers' website, go here. (http://ssje.org/ssje/2015/03/13/work-7-rhythm)

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Question: HOW IS THE PACE OF YOUR LIFE?

Transcript of Video:

I was saying to a guest yesterday that since we’ve started keeping animals and gardening at Emery House that I’ve learned an enormous amount. And one of the things that fascinates me is the cycle of chickens laying eggs. A chicken can lay an egg every 25 hours, depending on the amount of sunlight it gets. A chicken needs about 14 to 16 hours of sunlight in order for the hormones to kick in to lay the egg, and so egg laying is connected to the amount of sun. And so we’ve noticed at Emery House that the production of eggs declines as the days get shorter and the nights get longer, and there are ways to alter this. We could put a light in the chicken coop and fool the chickens that it’s light 24 hours a day, and that would increase their productivity, and so they would be producing their egg every 25 hours, whether or not it was pitch black outside for 20 of those hours or not.

And I decided a couple of years ago that that didn’t seem to me to be fair to the chickens, because for some reason or other, God created them to work in this way. And if we try to artificially stimulate them to produce eggs, it’s like us artificially stimulating us to work overtime all the time. And so I think if we can take a lesson from the chickens: the chickens need a break from egg laying, and I think we need a break every once in a while. Either weekly with a Sabbath or an annual holiday or something like that, or a retreat. Just so that, as the chickens sort of recharge themselves during the slower period, so we can recharge ourselves as well.

                                                              -Br. James Koester

Blessings on our journey to re-order time in our lives,
Agatha