Another Saturday out at ‘the farm’ and the question was what to do? Dad was happy to get rid of grumbly, gripey boys so we didn’t have to do soil erosion control (another story). I was laying in the hay and wishing I was somewhere else as any 3rd grader would do when I spied this hen hanging around the steps up to the hay mow (for you city slickers, that is a heap or pile of hay). She was hiding something and sure enough I found a nest by the stairs WITH LOTS OF EGGS IN IT. Twenty three to be exact. I still remember! I filled up my cap with a lot of them. The shirt I had on held six or eight more which rested just above the waist band. Lucky me, I was wearing my big brother Ed’s hand-me-down blue jeans that were over-sized enough to hold four eggs in each front pocket. Like Frankenstein in the movies I began to walk for the house. Didn’t do too bad until I came to the stairs and then everything fell apart. One of the eggs in the cap started to fall and I bent over to catch it; an egg in my pant pocket broke with a sickening crunch and my pocket filled with something wet and slimy and stinky!!! I pulled the pants away from the mess in my front pocket and an egg in my hip pocket broke too. Things were way out of hand by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs. The worst part of the whole episode was that when I got to the house I was told that all the eggs were too old and needed to be thrown away. This time it was me to the hose and the embarrassment of standing all the way home. What did I learn out of that? Not much until later. Immediately, I learned that I too can be a stinker who can get embarassed easily. Later I learned a bit more from the incident: Something about greed in my character; something about wanting to produce something good but too often bringing forth something rotten. And probably the best thing I learned was that I could be loved and accepted by my family in spite of what I was at that moment in time. It became easily recognized when learned many years later that …For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly….But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinner, Christ died for us… Romans 5:6, 8.