Let's play Chicken with the Powers that be.
 
Several weeks ago, Monday, I told you of the hail storm that decimated our garden. Saturday, the weatherman, in his undeserved, confidant voice, declared that storms again were headed our way. Expect strong winds and large hail.
 
So we scrambled. We hustled. We bustled our bushels and set everything right and all things tight. We tented with thick plastic tarping, the furrowed rows, tomatoes and eggplant and turnips crowned with Rhiner's Circus, black plastic hats tapered high, flat top, anchored with a rock, against the coming tempest. We even covered the pumpkin patch with an eight foot diameter satellite dish I one day plan on painting as a twenty foot daffodil.
 
We were ready. We were prepared. We could sleep soundly.
 
But all night long we waited for the wind, for the tornado, for the hail. And all that came was a steady rain, a perfect, all night long, gentle rain. It finally pattered us to sleep, to sleep, to sleep, to wake to a thousand disappointed, thirsty plants, our garden friends covered in plastic and buckets and good intentions.
 
Four hours we prepared for the storm that never came! For two hours we cleaned it all up, after nothing.
 
"If we hadn't prepared, the hail would have come. But we were ready, so it didn't," Lynn's position.
 
Like when you wash your car, chances for rain increase eighty-nine point nine-nine percent.
 
We swerved. We chickened out and the storm never came. Had we not turned, had we not prepared for the storm, would it have come?
 
Play Chicken with the Powers that be.
 
So this crazy guy we know, knows it's against the law to have chickens in a residential zone in Austin. So he puts up a triangular tank of a chicken-coop on the front corner of his lot, on the corner of two fairly prominent streets and fills his odd Sherman with four Rhode Island Reds, a huge middle finger poking straight up to the Powers that be. 
 
And screams, "Screw you!" 
 
Austin residential code does not allow poultry or farm stock or more than three, four-legged friends to co-inhabit a human's habitation and this guy maintained the bad habit of playing Chicken with the Powers that be.
 
Bad habit, loving animals.
 
Bad politics to want fresh laid eggs every morning.
 
Bad mojo to play Chicken with the Powers that be.
 
Well now, get this, anybody, on any lot in Austin, the Great State of Texas can have, two chickens per five-thousand square feet of land that is yours played Chicken with the Powers that be.
 
And the Powers that be chickened out.
 
There are chickens again in Austin.
 
Texas.
 
"Oh ye of little faith," "thou knowest better than I, in sure and perfect knowledge what is and shall be." (My twist on the twisting of parable.)
 
Sometimes, playing Chicken with the Powers that be requires that thing beyond faith. It's called Works.
 
Today's Monday Message is egg newly laid. 
 
In my face.
 
For what comes first, before chicken or egg, is faith, is works.
 
We were ready for the storm that never came.
 
But remember. 
 
Shhhhhhhhhhh ... IT Happens!