Welcome to
Haywards Heath United Reformed Church

 PECKING ALONG

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Come to the window for a moment

Look between the ferns at the edge of the garden

and you may see a small hen

she hasn’t laid an egg since she was born

[and] can’t sing……

Yet

I love her still…

            ©Stephen Falconer 2025

 

This hen has neither egg to lay nor song to sing and yet she is beloved.

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Maybe in the same way God’s love for all the world and all people is unconditional. It is love for its own sake, not for the qualities of what we produce, be it eggs or anything else, nor for how well we are able to perform whether our ‘thing’ is singing or something else.

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This poem goes on to imagine the observer coming out into the garden and walking to the washing line. The non-laying, non-singing hen comes and joins him on his walk and ‘pecks along’ with him.

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And so maybe we in our way can peck along with the God who goes to the place where the world’s grubby washing is cleansed by his Son’s love and in his Spirit’s wind.

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Often in August we used to stay at a country cottage whose kitchen window closely overlooked recently harvested fields and pecking birds – the best kitchen window I’ve ever had! What’ s yours?