Caged.

Our beautiful, friendly chickens are now in a pen.

Caged. 

The problem is that they are too friendly....and had taken to invading our neighbor's yard, his porch, his garden, his lawn mower shed.

One day I happened to notice that Tenderfoot seemed to be missing around the same time every day.

(Tenderfoot)

And I noticed that there didn't seem to be as many eggs in the coop as I was expecting.   So I went on a hunt.

This is what I found...........

 

13 eggs!!!!  With Tenderfoot on top!  I guess she was thinking about starting a family.

 

These chickens have been so much fun mainly because they follow us out to do our chores, they come running across the yard when we call them, we look out our windows to find them roosting in silly spots (like on the deck rails or beside the mailbox fence), Isabel picks them up and swings with them on the playset, we turn over rocks and logs so they can find bugs....

 

 

 

On Saturday that ended abruptly when our neighbor's daughter came to our door and asked us to keep our chickens off of her property.

 

And she's right.  Our chickens should be kept on our own property.  So we put a dog kennel around the chicken coop, but our chickens just don't understand. 

 

IF you think a chicken can't look at you with a sad expression on it's little chicken face, you are wrong!

And we've been pretty depressed about it.

 

I've really been going back and forth in my head over it.  She had every right to ask us to keep our chickens on our land.  So why was I so upset over it?

 

Today, Rob put it into words.  "Because you've put a free animal into a cage."

 

Yes, that was it.  We put these free animals into a cage and now everyone is sad.  Not just the chickens, but the people who were watching these funny birds....we are sad too!

 

We are working on building a chicken tractor, so that they can go out into a bigger space during the day, while still remaining confined on our property.

 

Of course, I began thinking that maybe God wanted me to understand something more.  Because true freedom comes only from following His commandments.  God gives us rules to follow not because He wants to boss us around and control us, but out of Love, in order to set us free.

 

And we can only be truly happy when we are living that true freedom; loving God and obeying His commandments.