Brooding

I’ve had a problem with people who complain that some of my blogs are so long. I have had those that are worth 10 minutes of reading. That’s too much for some, while to those same people, sitting to watch an entire season of a series on Netflix whose episode each is 45 minutes is nothing!

The behind the scenes is always overlooked. I spend hours typing those things: hours of research, hours of meditation, hours of coordination, hours of prayer, hours of thought and hours of editing, before I can press the button ‘publish’.

I am so, because of this thing I learnt called brooding taught by His truly, the Holy Spirit. This is the act where a hen sits over its eggs for long periods of time to enable them hatch, and even after hatching, this extra brooding by the mother hen provides adequate warmth to the chicks.

When a person tries to steal the egg as a hen broods, it tends to beak back menacingly. It’s protecting, growing, caring for and NURTURING what came out of it. It’s looking out for the good of the chick.

The movie Avatar was originally conceptualized by James Cameron in 1994. But he says the world didn’t have the technology he needed to paint the actual picture of his vision. So, he waited. He kept the idea alive, as — I think — he worked with different people to avail what he needed.

Shockingly, it took more than a decade to have that tech! 15 years later, the movie Avatar hit the big screens and it garnered more than 2.9 billion US dollars at the box office, making it the highest grossing film of all time. He sought to make a sequel, The Way of Water. It took him another 14 years to develop this one. It was shot mostly under water, and like the first, he needed to invent new technology. He didn’t rush to get it out. He only did when it was ready, and it too garnered more than 2.1 billion US dollars as of today.

James is a typical example of a good brooder. Let’s picture him as the hen, and these movies the eggs. I believe, if they came out earlier than they did, the CGI would not have been breathtaking. People would not have been blown away.

The mistake many of us do today is not giving ‘our eggs’ enough time. See them as ideas or dreams in this case. Chicken that lay and run about leave their eggs exposed to rats and snakes and other hazards. This is equivalent to us letting loose our ideas or dreams to be eaten or choked by the world we live in, or the vile opinions we receive from people. We need to brood long enough so that once the eggs hatch, the chicks (offspring) are in the proper condition.

My colleague who has a farm said that the result of brooding is like a baby breastfeeding. It gets to discover the motherly love. The mother hen feeds the chick when it’s hungry. Unlike those that hatch in incubators, they have no mother figure; none to ‘breastfeed’ or look out for them … Think of that chick. It’ll grow in insecurity; as an orphan. No one will affirm love to it. It’ll have no purpose to live for if life in its essence hasn’t been defined the way it’s supposed to be by a mother.

Also notice that local chicken (especially here in Africa) lay eggs to preserve posterity or legacy. They hatch them so that those chicks could one day have children of their own. But if a hen is always laying and these eggs taken for consumption by man, then tell me, what will the future of chicken look like, if that hen for example was the last chicken on earth.

Some chicken develop vices, and eat their own eggs. That’s cannibalism and murder at the same time. Many of us get brilliant ideas and then suddenly kill them. That idea could be the next Avatar. You’d be the next James Cameron. But no — every sketch you crumble and throw in the trashcan counting it unworthy.

The moral is not for us to kill every idea; and also not to be pressured to release immature ideas. It’s for us to allow time for potential ideas. To guard them. To speak life and see life in them even when others don’t … to do our best — polishing them to the maximum before releasing them to the world as EXCELLENT, knowing that they’ll be healthy and safe like chicks that have been well nurtured and that they’ll grow to multiply, like chicks maturing to start laying their own eggs.

The reason why I love revisiting most of my writings before I publish them is; a new idea always presents itself, perhaps one I had missed before. I then note it down too to help the reader’s understanding. For the book I published in 2020, I first wrote in 2010. But for all those years in between, I kept on revisiting the characters and book setting, improving each with every ounce of knowledge I gained from reading elsewhere, until it was good enough for the world.

So that’s why I will continue spending hours typing, hours researching, hours meditating, hours coordinating, hours praying, hours thinking and hours editing. When we apply this aspect of brooding in all we do (be it engineering, tailoring, baking, studying etc.), when the ideas formulated in our minds drop, they’ll cause an earthquake so loud, like an elephant calf which has just been born — due to its heavy weight.

Why an elephant?

For dogs, rabbits, cats, their gestation period is very very short. Two months and their cubs are wild and running. They are but small creatures. An elephant however carries for 22 months. That’s close to two years! But the baby comes out as a giant already and grows more humongous everyday.

May that be the same for your ideas too!

Keep brooding! No rush! Allow for time. For even so, the Holy Spirit brooded over the waters and face of the deep, to bring to pass whatever God spoke in the beginning. That means He had to be earth’s mother hen, so that the different kinds of creations (eggs) — animals, birds, plants, fish, you — could receive the right conditions to hatch, to be, and to LIVE!

‘Allow time’ also means to let preparation have its full work. Some young Christians today want to be like Jesus: to preach and heal and multiply bread, but they forget the time he disappeared between his 12th year and 30th. They want to be on the stage, beneath the lights … preaching unbrooded revelation and understanding, which perhaps God needed to enlighten them more about. But they left the hospital still pregnant as the baby was only half way out! That could lead to a stillbirth! And we need to take very, very much care.

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Unbrooded chicks sometimes die shortly after hatching because of the harsh environment encountered outside the eggshell, primarily due to the absence of the mother hen. Let that hen not be you!

Brood!