When
I was a teenager I had a hobby that doubled as a little side income. I would purchase young or untrained horses,
train them and resell them. To this day I marvel that I’m alive after some of the stupid stunts I pulled with those
horses. My guardian angels must have
been exhausted by the end of every summer.
But those summers proved to be some of the best summers of my life!
To
me, there was nothing more exciting to me than buying a new horse. I loved wandering through compete stranger’s
barns and pastures, petting the velvety noses, scratching behind ears and
daydreaming about how I could coach any of these horses to be the perfect western pleasure mount. While other
girls my age daydreamed about boys and went shopping for clothes every spring,
I dreamed of horses, and shopped for bloodlines!
One
year I had just picked out my next prospect, A beautiful black Arabian gelding,
he was incredibly good looking, had an impressive pedigree, and most
importantly in my teenage mind he had a long mane and tail. Excitedly I helped my father hook up the
stock trailer and embarked on the task of bringing him home.
Our
yard at the time was perfect for owning horses. We
have a beautiful, luscious forty acre pasture.
It has at least five ponds, beautiful shady oak trees, and in
three generations no one in our family has ever grazed it down. To me
this pasture was a magical place. There was nothing more relaxing than a long walk
in in the pasture when the sun was setting, and the leaves were turning
gold. The smell of autumn, the leaves
crunching beneath my feet, and a herd of six horses following me wherever I went begging for treats made it one of the best places in the world. The horses loved their
home too, every spring when theywhere turned loose in the pasture for the first
time they would run, buck, rear, and kick up their heels over the sheer joy of their new
freedom.
Sadly our horse trailer was not anything like our pasture. Far from being magical, or even scenic, it
can only be described a decrepit thirty year old, primarily rust colored rolling junkyard. Although it was still
sturdy enough to be safe, it most certainly is not pretty. To a horse who had never been in any trailers
before, this certainly did not look like a comfortable, happy, or even safe
place. Suffice to say, it took three
people, an hour, a bucket of grain and a lot of coaxing to get my newest acquisition into our rust bucket of a horse trailer.
To
my new horse, that trailer was the ultimate destination. He couldn't see past all of the metal and
rust to our pasture. He was not thinking
about 40 acres of luscious green grass, shady oak trees, or pleasant ponds, all
he saw was a cold, rusty, metal horse eating machine.
In
a way it reminds me of how we humans view death. The 23 Psalm speaks of “walking through the
valley of the shadow of death.” Did you
catch that? It’s just a shadow! Like our stock trailer, death appears to be a
cold, ugly, dark place. But in reality,
it is just a means of moving from one place to another. Death is not the final destination, and we
have an advantage over that horse, he didn't know where he was going, he had no
way of knowing what lay before him, but we can.
God has promised us greener pastures filled with things more beautiful
than we could ever imagine. He’s never
lied to us yet, so why are you afraid of the trailer?
