There she sat for days on end, long after the date when her eggs should have hatched. If only they had been eggs.

To persuade my hens to lay in their new nesting boxes, I had put golf balls in each nest. Most of the hens settled in and obligingly began depositing eggs. One poor creature, however, adopted the golf balls.

Thinking that she would eventually abandon them, I let her alone. But for two months she sat, determined to hatch those golf balls. Finally, worried that she would brood herself to death, I removed them. To my surprise, she got up, fluffed her feathers and with not even a glance at her empty nest, scurried off to resume normal life.

Isn't this how people sometimes behave? Some years ago, I read a syndicated advice column that a woman had inherited a collection of china figurines. For years, she cared for them, dusting and fretting, much like a broody hen. Then an earthquake toppled the cases, smashing the entire assemblage. To her astonishment, the woman felt emancipated. She realized that she had never wanted the collection, never even liked it. She had cared for it only out of a sense of obligation to the giver. How much time she had wasted, brooding like my hen over those golf balls, on something that had never been any part of her. Had it not been for the earthquake, she might have spent the rest of her life crippled by resentment and a false notion of duty.

The Gospel (John 5:1-5) contains a story about someone in a similar predicament. It begins with a description of a pool purported to have curative powers. On some occasions, a spirit entered the spring and agitated its waters. The first person who could get into the pool after this event would find healing. Not surprisingly, the surrounding steps were crammed with sick people waiting for a chance to take the plunge. The notion of lining up and taking turns being unknown to this culture, every time the spring bubbled, people scrambled over each other to reach the healing waters.

In this crowd was a fellow who had been crippled for 38 years. How much of that time had he spent by the pool? The Bible does not say. Clearly he had been languishing there long enough to be discouraged about his prospects, for when Jesus walks by and asks him if he really wants to be healed, he responds with what seems like a well-rehearsed litany of reasons why he's still there: "There's no one here to help me," he whines. "Every time I try to get into the water, someone pushes me aside and steps in first!"

Instead of sympathizing with the man or offering to give him a hand into the pool, Jesus brusquely tells him to get up, roll up the mat on which he had been lying and move on. The man obeys. Like the hen, suddenly bereft of her golf balls, he simply walks off and takes up a normal life. All those years he spent brooding by the pool had not produced any healing; a momentary encounter with Christ yanked away the helplessness and dependence that had enfeebled him and he was instantly made whole.

Much religious and philosophical literature contains stories like this, of people whose lives radically changed when something took away the golf balls they had vainly been trying to hatch. However, such deliverance does not require a sympathetic chicken farmer, an earthquake or even a Messiah. All it takes is recognizing the golf balls for what they are, unproductive and foreign, and then walking away from them.

If you are brooding on some unproductive aspect of your life — past hurts, unappealing character traits, addictions — try this: No matter how long you may have sat on them, those golf balls have not become a part of you, nor will they ever hatch, so just leave them. Like my hen, you can shake yourself off and live a productive life.

H.M. Wyeth is a member of the Christian Science Society, Kaua'i.