I have a confession. Lent was a bust. 

Instead of having my priorities adjusted by the bodily disciplines of a 40-day fast, I succumbed to the demands of my schedule and felt like it was an accomplishment if I managed to abstain from meat on Fridays. I failed to do even that on Good Friday.

My spiritual reading didn't go much better. The Lenten devotional booklet I picked up at All Saints Episcopal Church in Bay Head on Ash Wednesday sat mostly neglected on a shelf. 

I did read a book late in the season that reminded me it isn't only work that orders my days. It's chickens who must be tended morning, noon, and night. 

In an age when abstaining from anything from Starbucks to Facebook counts as a spiritual fast, perhaps the demanding rhythms of emerging spring are reordering enough.

Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living is the book that caught and redirected my attention. It occurred to me as I was reading it that Good Friday was the first anniversary of when my family adopted six baby chickens. 

Author Craig L. Goodwin and his family decided to ditch their consumer-driven lives in the waning days of  2007 as a matter of Christian discipleship. They had four basic rules for themselves as they embarked on a transformative year-long experiment in simple living. Everything they consumed had to be produced locally, used, homemade or homegrown. 

As I read about their journey, I thought about my own, which began in high school when my mother bought me the More with Less cookbook. Goodwin mentions this 1976 Mennonite classic early in Year of Plenty because it's not only a cookbook, it's a guide for how to eat simply and consume less of the world's resources. It was also the catalyst for my decision to attend Eastern Mennonite University, which in turn shaped the way I've lived my life. Its mention in Year of Plenty inclined me to pay less attention to my ordinary failures and more to the basic trajectory of my journey. 

My husband grew up on a 4-acre farm in Herbertsville and in 2006 we worked on a nonprofit ranch in the high desert of San Diego County. Double R Ranch was home to 40 horses, 300 goats and enough chickens to feed five staff members and 12 homeless men breakfast every day. The men had graduated from a recovery program at the Orange County Rescue Mission in Tustin, Calif., and came to the ranch for job training and horse therapy. Caring for sensitive, temperamental animals eased them back into relationships with people. I saw this approach do wonders for others and experienced the healing power of ranch life myself.

After our son died and we moved back to New Jersey, I knew I wanted to recapture some of that life, particularly for our other son, who lost his only sibling. I also wanted to produce as much food as possible on our little plot of land in the Mantoloking Road section of Brick, just in case the worst case economic forecasts of 2008 and 2009 came to pass.

We brought six hens home to our suburban neighborhood and named them after the matriarchs in our family: Bertha, Wilma, Constance, Grace, Rose and Ann. After building a coop with my father and husband, my son built me two raised beds, and I planted my first successful garden, along with an assortment of fruit trees and bushes. 

In Year of Plenty Goodwin tells a story about trying to coax seeds to life in a greenhouse before winter broke. He writes:

"I thought I could sneak around the limits of the season: length of days, soil temperatures, hard freezes, long shadows from a low-slung sun. I attended to these realities initially only in as much as I wanted to overcome them, to contort them to my timing. My creative energies went into how to get around them and get a leg up. 

But I learned that year the lesson I learn every year, only harder. These boundaries can be stretched and fudged, but they cannot be overcome. They are boundaries beyond my control, marching forward at their own mysterious pace. Efforts to fool the seasons in a particular place always, yes always, end up making us the fool. ...

As the futility of my efforts to grow food set in, I began to take a different perspective. My view shifted and my attention turned to what the spring thaw offered up, instead of what it disallowed. With these new eyes to see I noticed the wonder of rhubarb bursting out of the ground, crinkled and leathery. Not far from my suffering plant starts were what gardeners call 'volunteers.' Here I had been forcing my will on plants like a garden tyrant conscripting a fearful population of early season vegetables when, from every corner of the yard, there were volunteers coming forward of their own free will---cilantro, dill, chives, and dandelions. ...

As we made the first transition from one season to the next, we were learning to pay keen attention to nature---and not just to scheme and contrive a way around it. We were learning to see gifts where there had once only been inconveniences. We were learning that life has certain immutable rhythms and that there is unexpected joy in letting creation lead the dance."

Like Goodwin's garden volunteers, these Lenten "volunteers" emerged to reinforce the fact that I hold two biblical principles in tension: I work out my salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12) and simultaneously rest in the knowledge that God who began a work in me will bring it to completion (Philippians 1:6). 

Although I failed to carefully follow the Lenten fast prescribed by my church, the poultry and produce I invested in last season demanded my attention and broke me free of the cycle of work, eat, sleep. 

The chicken coop and pen needed to be freed from their winter insulation. Peach and pear trees began to flower. Thyme, sage, chives, and oregano decided to live through two blizzards under which many shore towns' public services faltered. Blackberry bushes burst through the earth and spread. Even as I write this column, the promise of bounty calls out for attention.

Goodwin is right. There is unexpected joy (and grace) in letting creation lead the dance.