Alfred Hitchcock's Chicken

I'm preaching tomorrow, and have been adamant that I'll use note cards rather than a full text. So, I worked in Barnes & Noble today, starting to make scratches on my index cards...and the whole sermon started spilling out in complete sentences, then paragraphs. I thought, "Oh, no you don't!" Again I tried writing only key phrases. Nope. This baby wanted a text.

Here's the image I had next: a lone chicken, walking across the cafe. "Chicken!" I thought about myself, "Not brave enough to go with nothing more than simple notes!" And immediately, I got into the boat, (oops, wrong gospel) and thought of Alfred Hitchcock. The Archer will appreciate this.

When I took a course in Horror Films in graduate school (back in 1978/79) I learned that in virtually all Alfred Hitchcock films, there is a chicken somewhere in the movie. Sometimes that chicken is pretty subtle, but it's there. The chicken I saw today in the coffee shop was my own personal poultrygeist, taunting me, but in the end I'm happy with my sermon, and the chicken can just cross the road for all I care.