The Great Feast to Come
About 15 years ago, a neighbor, who has some experience raising other types of poultry, partnered with me in raising a small flock of turkeys, of the heritage variety “Bourbon Reds.” This variety has reddish-brown body feathers, with a large patch of white on the wings and on the back. As I recall, I paid for the little chicks (“poults” they are called) and the feed bills, and he was to raise them to the point where they could be let out to forage for themselves: HAH— that was a laugh! [About which, more later.] My neighbor had the hard work at first: these 20 little helpless things had to be under an incubator at first, and needed to be checked on constantly to be sure they were warm enough (but not TOO warm), eating and drinking normally, not piling onto and smothering one another, not pecking one another to death, etc. Once they were moved out of the incubator and into the coop/pen area, there was constantly a need to be sure they had water and feed, and that varmints had not gotten in to wreak havoc (such as a big chicken snake or a coon or other predator). 16 of the poults survived to adulthood and eventually made it to harvest time.
My job (aside from paying the bills) was to “walk” the turkeys daily once they were big enough to be turned out of the pen to forage on their own. The idea was that they would eat lots of grasshoppers, worms, caterpillars, beetles, ants, bugs of all sorts, along with fresh plant growth here and there, to help enrich their diet and develop greater flavor in the meat of the birds later. What a silly dream that was: those young turkeys would jump back in alarm even if just a tiny grasshopper flew up from the grass!
There was never any “on their own” to these birds, the dumbest I had ever encountered: “walking” them mean FORCING them out of the comfort of their pen, which had water and grain-based food close-at- hand, and into the grassy, weedy, “whole-wide-world” pasture where the bugs were.
I used a long walking stick (like a shepherd’s crook) and tried to push them along by holding the stick out horizontal to the ground, but they did not take kindly to such guidance and often just plopped down where they were, especially if they were in the shade.
And if we encountered something as mysterious as a fresh cow-patty, all 16 of them crowded around to inspect it for ten minutes or so, each walking away a bit and then back, turning heads from side to side, dipping heads down and back up, to examine it from every possible angle. I could well believe the old tales of turkeys drowning in a rain shower because they turned their heads up to the sky to see what was making that water fall down on them!
The time and effort these birds needed from us to live to harvest was much more than we had expected, and we agreed NOT to repeat this exercise, once the 16 birds were slaughtered and cleaned in mid-November and safely in the freezers of their chefs/cooks [thanks to our crew of volunteer turkey butchers!].
Now, at Thanksgiving, I am able to enjoy the turkey feast with a deep appreciation for the work of the professional turkey farmers who nurture the “dumbas- posts” birds we are baking and eating that day! Beyond that, I am mindful of the patience which Jesus must have needed to “herd” his own bunch of only 12 disciples, who also needed to be cajoled and corrected and repeatedly told things before they “got it”! He, too, did that with just one seemingly “dumb-asposts” set of followers, and yet his instruction rooted and held fast and grew into a faith that we now share with more than two billion others world-wide. We mess up our lives over and over again, and yet our patient and loving Lord Jesus makes something of us anyway: we become his saints even as we continue in our sinful ways!
Praise and thanks to God for his great grace and his bountiful goodness that spreads the earthly turkey feast before us at Thanksgiving, along with the promise of our place in eternity at the Great Feast to Come, whether we are saint or sinner, sheep or turkey. God’s blessings to you at Thanksgiving, dear friends!
Citzler is a La Grange native.