I was replanting my window boxes at the weekend. The pansies that had flourished in recent months had become leggy, so I pulled them out, added some fresh compost and started to plant the marigolds.
Which is when I found the egg. Yes. The egg.
As I parted the soil, there, nestled deep in the damp darkness was a hen’s egg, perfect and unbroken, miraculously whole despite my energetic rooting around.
This was strange indeed.
It could only be an egg. There is nothing as plain as an egg and there is nowhere as familiar as a window box on your own windowsill.
But there is nothing as marvelously, strangely unexpected as an egg in a window box.
It seems most likely that a fox put it there – which adds a whole other level of wild mystery to the event. Even so, I really don’t know why I should have been surprised. After all, we live in a time when the whole ordinary world seems to have become extraordinary.
Everything is familiar but nothing is as it should be. It is a strange and alarming accident.
Christians believe that the strangest thing of all was also plain.
Jesus himself was familiar: a carpenter, a neighbour, a friend, a son and a nephew. He was ordinary.
But if he was plain like an egg, then, like my egg, left by the fox, he was not an accident but a wildly, mysteriously unexpected gift.
He spoke to a way of being, a way of loving, that was so radical, so revolutionary, that it is still calling people to reimagine the world today, whether in the community projects that have sprung up this year to answer the needs of the vulnerable; in the local and global action of the Black Lives Matters movement; or in the prophetic voice of Marcus Rashford.
These are the eggs in the window box: the world transformed and turned upside down by the actions and voices of plain people in unexpected ways.
I believe these are our gifts. They are to be cherished and their mystery wondered at.
Because there won’t always be an egg in the window box.
But when, occasionally, there is, it will be beautiful.