Barn Chronicles: Volume Two

Lesson 2: Owls Make Bad Roommates

For this post, a small primer on owls might prove helpful. Two attributes of owls stand out as particularly pertinent:

1. Owls are nocturnal.
2. Owls that live in my particular barn make a sound one could describe as horrific screeching. No pleasant hooting here, oh no. No no. No.

These two attributes (combined with the fact that I am decidedly not nocturnal and find horrific screeching to be fairly bothersome) have made my life slightly more difficult.

Most of the difficulty has come from my inability to understand the aforementioned owls. I know it sounds like I'm getting a tad excessive in my desire to comprehend, but this is what I do. I ask "why?" questions over and over until I hit a brick wall. Then I stare at the brick wall and ask "why?"

I actually managed to avoid that brick wall in relation to my current roommate (the owl, for those just joining us from the coverage of Olympic Puddle Jumping). The answer:

Because that's just what owls do.

At first, this didn't seem like a satisfactory answer at all. If this ridiculous nocturnal screeching is "just what owls do," how can I hope to do anything about it? And there's the rub. I want to be able to do something about this behavior. I want to be able to fix it, to solve my problem. Yet no amount of yelling or pleading or gunfire will change the fact that owls will persist in their nocturnality. That last solution might solve the screeching, but only until more owls show up.

This difficulty goes well beyond owls, as I'm sure we can all understand. Sometimes, we come across a problem, say in a person, which seems to be so innate that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it on our own. Not permanently, anyway. We might be able to inspire a temporary solution (i.e. gunfire + owls = momentary quiet), but the root issue is still there. Owls are still nocturnal. That person is still unforgiving. Our world is still full of people who just can't seem to stop hating each other. Feel free to go as deep or shallow as you like in regards to these problems.

I'm not arguing that we should stop trying to solve problems. That involves giving up hope, something I simply will not do (ever). Instead, I'm saying we need something beyond ourselves, because clearly we aren't capable of fixing every problem in the world on our own. Adding more people to the equation might help. However, increasing the amount of people who can't truly solve a problem doesn't seem to increase the likelihood of the problem being solved.

Instead, my experience here in the barn is telling me that we need to hope in something greater. For those who know me, you know that my bigger thing (or in this case person) is Jesus Christ. For those who didn't know, now you do. I think hope should have a basis, and Jesus certainly has that.

So thank you, owls. Thank you for reminding me who it is that I can hope in when problems seem too innate to be solved. Now please go to sleep, it's two in the morning.

With God's love and grace (in a barn),

Taylor

P.S. That "basis" I talked about for believing in Jesus is fairly vague, I know, but I don't have room to explore it in its totality here. Let me know if you would be interested in hearing more specifics on that.