December 1, 2007
Sunriver, OR
12 Do horses run on the rocky crags? Does one plow there with oxen? But you have turned justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into bitterness-- Amos 6:12
I hate horses.
Well, I don’t hate them as a species but I have never had good fortune with them. As a young guy growing up near my grandpa’s sixty acre ranch out in little Edna, California my dad and I used to ride quite often on my grandpas’ horses Peggy and Tony. One time when I was a stout five year old my dad put me on Peggy as he mounted Tony. All was well until he decided to tease me by galloping Tony, knowing Peggy would follow along.
As she galloped a hundred miles an hour I began screaming in horror, “Whoa!” Peggy out-of-control in what seemed like a dead sprint she ran under an old oak tree, which wouldn’t have been a problem except for the branch that was hanging down. The oak branch literally impaled me in the stomach leaving me flailing in the air until the branch eventually broke after ripping a gash on my torso. It wasn’t pretty. I still have 10 inch scar running up my torso as a reminder of that day around 1970.
Another early childhood memory was of dad coming home from a hunting trip with his 30.06 broken in half. Apparently his recently purchased horse, Tina, lost her balance on a trail and rolled down the hill splitting his favorite gun in half, but fortunately all that was hurt (beside the gun of course) was dad’s pride.
In the mid 1990’s, I was fishing native trout with my uncle Tony Madruga in the bottom of Lopez Canyon, California. Back then the head waters of Lopez Lake used to have an abundance of native land locked steelhead trout for those willing to work for it. These aggressive natives never grew beyond a certain size do to the stunted creek they lived in but the drakes would often grow a hook jaw and an oversized head. To access the headwaters, we would have to drop into the creek about 500 feet from a small single track. One day while fishing the headwaters we heard a loud crashing and looking up saw a white flash going end over end into the canyon. At first I thought it was a bear until I saw the saddle and the man rolling down behind it.
After running to his aid the man’s thumb was badly dislocated and the horse was bleeding profusely out of its back hock. We helped them back up the trail, pulled the man’s thumb back into socket (that was cool), they caught up with their riding party and we never saw them again.
Don’t even get me started about our mule deer trip to Wyoming in 2001. You can read about it in my essay, “California Rodeo in Wyoming”. If you would like I can send it to you.
The moral of my story is, from my limited experiences, horses are not the most sure footed of animals. If I were taking an animal into rocky terrain I would choose a mule, lama, alpaca or a teenager from our youth group any day over a horse.
Horses do serve a purpose and we should use them where they are the strongest. Amos asks a redundant question, “Do horses run on rocks?” The answer of course is “No”, but how often do we ask people to do things in the church simply because they have a pulse? Should we invite them to serve based on their abilities, passions and spiritual gifts? Horses are not made for rocks just as men are not made to satiate some pastor’s manipulative desires.
In other words, play to your strengths.
Say yes only to those things that match your purpose in life and nothing else. Say no to everything else. Say, “No” to anything outside of your skill set, giftedness, passion, and spiritual purpose. Let God use you according to His plan and not yours. Run your race for the Rock and learn to stay off the rocks that will cause you to slow or stumble.
“But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.” (1 Corinthians 12:18).
