#2 Big Chicken, Little Chicken
- Christian D'Andre
- Sep 25, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 14
When I sat down to watch Chicken Little for this series, I really latched onto the main character because of his place in the world. As the name implies, Chicken Little is…well…
Little.
So little, in fact, that it interferes with his daily life. He has trouble hitting the button at the stop light. He gets stuck to the gum at the crosswalk. That gum then causes him to lose his pants. And he can go flying with a well-shaken soda can. These were the things on my mind as I started the movie. But as the movie played out, I noticed a stark contrast at play. One that I think should be central to the theme of this series. You see, there’s a difference between being small, and feeling small. And the difference between the two can make up your ability to sink or swim. And this is the difference that I want to explain for you today.
Being small might refer to your position at work, your job in the world at large, or maybe even your actual height. Being small refers to the facts of life. Your income isn’t enough to buy you a Ferrari. Your height keeps you from reaching the top shelf on your own. And your voice might be so hoarse from that cold that you can’t really get your friend’s attention from across the room. It may be the case that these things will change some time in the future, like your height as you grow older, but if they aren’t factors that can immediately change, they are part of you being small.
And being small isn’t something to beat yourself up over. I know that we all tend to lean on these facts like crutches, but I’m actually trying to do the opposite. If you are only 4 feet tall, you need to accept that and learn to stand on a chair. If your income can’t afford it, you need to stop focusing on that ferrari. What I am trying to get you to do is to accept the things that we can’t really control.
The analogy that pops into my head is that of colored glasses. You might look at your white couch and see it turn green behind a pair of tinted shades. But the couch isn’t actually green, it’s white. In the same way, I’m trying to highlight the difference between your couch and how you see your couch. In other words, being short isn’t a reason to feel bad about yourself. Sure, it’s annoying sometimes, but if you can’t control it, your only real choice is to accept it.
And that leads us to feeling little. I have heard a story that says that if you tie a baby elephant to a wooden stake as a kid, it will accept that it is trapped, even in its adult years when it could very easily break free. That’s feeling small. It’s when you have something going on in your head that keeps you from living up to your full potential. It’s seeing yourself through a very warped set of goggles.
I saw this difference as I was watching the movie, and I realized that I was that elephant. I realized that I had everything I needed to go somewhere in life, and still something in my head was holding me back. I think most of the time, it’s my fear of messing up. It isn’t that I get bent out of shape because I spilled my orange juice, it’s more the fear from lacking guidance. I don’t just fear messing up, I fear being stuck in mess-upville, unable to escape because I don’t know how to get it right.
I like to think about it like this: my job has apprentices and journeymen. The journeymen get paired up with the apprentices and show them how to do stuff the right way so that they can become good journeymen themselves.
And so that the cycle can repeat itself.
I have often felt like I ought to have that in life. Like I should have someone to live alongside to help me grow in life skills, to make me good at life. But I have always felt like I have had to fend for myself, figuring it all out on my own. Because of this, I have always shied away from new things until I could have them taught to me, to help me figure it all out so that I can actually get it right. Only after someone shows me how to do something, then watches me do it three times, telling me each time that I got it right, do I actually have even a seedling of confidence that I can do something.
And I noticed that the Chicken Little was the opposite. He is brimming with confidence. Sure, he’s quite down on his luck at the start of the movie, but his confidence overflows to the point that he fires like a loaded gun at every opportunity. From marching up to Foxy Loxy, the school bully, shouting that she should “prepare to hurt;” to his eagerness to join the baseball team; to his desperate wish for just a chance to prove himself, you could almost say he was a little too confident. Maybe you could argue that his glasses were a little tinted, themselves.
And that leads me to my next point: there may or may not be such a thing as a perfectly clear set of glasses. It may be the case that they will always be tinted in one direction or the other. The point I really want to make is that you can use the contrast between how things are and how they seem to you to adjust how you are feeling. You might feel like a terrible singer, but if you were to stop and think “I mean, everyone really likes my voice. Could it really be that bad?” This could help you push yourself back towards the middle. At least, enough so that you can get out there and live life.
Sometimes I wonder if this is part of what Jesus meant when he talked about being “innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents.” I wonder if a way of understanding this passage is that Jesus told us that we might feel small. Heck, by the world’s standards, maybe we ought to feel small. But because Jesus has already overcome the world and made everything redeemable, we should remind ourselves that we aren’t small. Well, Jesus isn’t small, and we are on team Jesus, so that makes us not-small by extension. I dunno, I could be wrong, but it seems like that makes sense to me.
So try to start taking note of the difference between how you feel about yourself, and how you actually are. Ask yourself if the things you feel badly about are things you can change, and how quickly. Try to see yourself through a different pair of tinted glasses, and begin to grow a massive heart that stretches the chest that carries it.
Until next time
May Peace be your Guide.
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