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Weekly Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country
of West Texas
Opinion
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Squarely Pegged
By Peggy McCracken
What came first:
chicken or egg?
Anyone with a little knowledge of chickens should be able to figure out that the chicken came first. Else who would hatch the egg?
Cody Vernon’s class is having a little experiment in egg hatching this month, so he may be able to enlighten us. Elva Lujan provided them with 26 fertile eggs, which they put into an incubator for the required three weeks of warmth and turning to change the yellow yolk into a wet, ugly chick.
They won’t be ugly long, and I’ll bet every child in that class will take home a downy red, black, yellow or white cheeper before May flowers bloom.
Kathy Lujan and Liz Vega have their own end-of-school project for kindergarten through third grades at the God’s Army house on Veterans. The kids have pulled weeds and grass from the front flowerbed, and plan to set out petunias. Red to match the house trim, I suspect.
Why is it that nobody asks whether the flower or the seed came first?
I see the controversy over teaching evolution versus creation in public schools is still very much alive. Everywhere I look, the “Big Bang” and evolution (natural selection) are being promoted as the means by which the everything came into existence and has progressed from nothing to the infinitely complicated universe as we know it.
When I look at a beautiful flower, a downy chick or the face of an innocent child, I see the hand of God: a divine, wise and knowledgeable being who created everything out of nothing.
Our fourth through sixth graders in God’s Army memorize this verse as part of their curriculum: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Heb. 11:3, NIV
If you follow the timeline of creation as described in the first book of the Bible, you can understand how the chicken came before the egg, because everything was created in order.
First came light out of darkness (day and night); then the sky, water and land were separated to form the earth, where seed-bearing plants and trees began to grow on the third day (helped along by the light and the and nutrients in the ground).
God made the sun and moon and stars to separate the day from the night, and to mark seasons and days and years, while providing light.
On the fifth day, God caused living creatures to swim in the seas and to fly above the earth. Next he created animals to live on land. His crowning act of creation was to make man in his own image and he gave man (male and female) authority to rule over all the animals, fish and fowl, and to tend the plants and to eat them.
“So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Gen. 1:27, NIV
Then he rested on the seventh day. “And he blessed the seventh day and made it holy...” Gen. 2:3, NIV
And that, my children, is how the chicken came into existence. After God made roosters and hens, he told them to be fruitful and multiply, so they coupled up, produced fertile eggs and hatched them the old-fashioned way. Mama hen sat on the nest of about 15 eggs for 21 days, keeping them warm and turning them every day to keep the sac from attaching to the shell.
Since God gave man authority over His creatures, man invented the incubator to keep the eggs warm so he could hatch a bigger batch at one time. But who turns them over each day? Maybe Cody can tell us when his project is complete.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Gen. 1:1, NIV
EDITOR’S NOTE: Peggy McCracken is Enterprise staff writer. Contact her at HYPERLINK "mailto:peg2@pecos.net" peg2@pecos.net
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