| THE LORD GAVE
"Foolish woman? Shall we accept
good from God and not evil? The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken
away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.
– Job
From nowhere along the dirt road where
we drive to work every morning orange-eyed yellow daisies have
suddenly bloomed. Out of the dust and terrible dryness, daisies have
turned our road into a royal path.
A HORSE POINTS THE WAY
We wouldn’t have noticed the house
where we live now if it hadn’t been for a horse. In fact, we were
lost. In the pasture we spotted a coyote as big as a German
shepherd, studying the calves in the pasture across the road. We
stopped, but he paid us no attention. He stared as long as he
wanted, then loped off.
We finally came to a fork in the road.
There at the fence corner stood a magnificent white Arabian, hanging
his head over the fence, staring at us. Weird as it sounds, it
seemed that he was welcoming us. I mentioned it to Susan,
shook my head, and drove on. Later my son Wright got lost again, and
found out that house was available. One thing led to another, and we
ended up there. The horse was for sale.
Everybody has their gifts, and
Justin’s gift is handling horses and animals. Mysteriously they
recognize they have to obey him. The horse, General, was fairly old,
but in good shape and inexpensive, so I bought him as a Christmas
present for Justin.
THEN A DOG
We moved in, and Zachariah decided he
must have a dog. I asked a veterinarian friend what sort of dog he
would recommend for the country (with the coyotes in mind), and he
recommended a Great Pyrenees. They’re big gentle dogs, and bond to
whatever animals they live with, making them excellent guard dogs.
So Zach and I spent a long hot Saturday driving over to Corinth and
buying a Great Pyrenees puppy. Now a pup like that grows up into a
magnificent dog, so he has to have a grand name. Zach settled on
"Kaiser."
Kaiser was big and friendly, like a
giant cotton ball. Justin started working with him, and was
astonished at how tractable and eager to please he was. His greatest
sin was chasing chickens, but since he had been raised around them
there was no danger he’d bother them, other than stirring up for a
little fun.
THOSE FATEFUL JARS
Every month Susan and I drive down to
New Albany, Mississippi to take the newsletter to the printer. Last
month as usual, while we were waiting we went shopping at Wal-Mart.
Susan found two pallets of quart canning jars at about half
the price they were selling for up here. We bought them all, some
for us and some for our friends here, and made arrangements to pick
them up Saturday.
THEN PIGS
That was Thursday. On Friday Susan and
I again yielded to Zachariah’s importuning, this time for pigs.
Our Y2K preparations wouldn’t be complete, Zach argued, without
pigs. The long and short of this was we ended up with two
pigs. There was an old dog pen in the pasture where we kept General,
so we put them over there. Zach had bought 50 pounds of pig mash,
and we put that in a galvanized garbage can with a lid, near the
pigpen.
Saturday was a busy day for all of us.
Susan and Zach drove to New Albany for the jars while Justin and I
spent most of the day helping Friar Chuck move. When we came back we
took a tour of the back side of the far pasture, looking for
springs. When we got back to the house, we spied two pigs in our
front yard!
Forget chasing pigs. They can
run 45 miles an hour and turn on a dime. After Justin and I had
thoroughly exhausted ourselves, Susan drove up in the truck, pulling
a trailer load of jars.
THAT SUDDENLY
She backed the truck into the tractor
shed and Justin unhitched the trailer. I was in the truck in the
next stall, getting ready to pull out when Susan climbed in her
truck and pulled away. She couldn’t see that Kaiser had lain down in
front of her truck wheel. Justin and I watched helplessly as the
truck wheel rolled over him.
He was killed almost instantly. Susan
was horrified, weeping inconsolably. Justin and I stood stockstill,
shocked clueless. I pulled up my truck and let down the back gate by
Kaiser. I told Justin I would go get some shovels and asked him to
put Kaiser in the back of the truck. Justin just looked at me. "I
can’t," he said.
I reached down to get him as quickly
as I could. I didn’t want Susan to have to see him. Zachariah stood
by in shocked disbelief. I asked him where he wanted us to bury him,
and he pointed over to a hill at the back of the property, beneath a
line of trees.
After I herded Susan into the house,
Justin and I got shovels. Zach climbed up on the back of the trailer
next to Kaiser. We drove over the pasture to the hill and started
digging.
The dirt was so hard we couldn’t dig,
we just had to use the shovels like picks, pecking out a grave. Zach
and Justin said nothing, and I was grateful not to have to speak. I
was doing all right until I realized that the grave wasn’t big
enough. "It won’t do," I said, "he’s such a big dog."
Zach went back to the house to check
on Susan and get something. Justin and I drove over to the other
pasture to pick up some big rocks to cover the grave. I couldn’t
bear to think about the coyotes digging him up. It was almost
dark.
We had no more gotten back than I saw
the lights of the other truck bumping across the pasture. Susan
pulled up and frantically yelled, "You’ve got to come over to the
barn. General’s down and his legs are stiff and he all
swollen."
ONE DISASTER AT A TIME
One disaster at a time was all I could
think. We drove over to the barn and there was General, lying on his
side, stiff-legged and swollen. I ran and called our friend Arnold
Threatt. I knew General was foundering but didn’t know what to do.
Where could he have gotten into grain? Then it hit me: the pig
feed.
Arnold, bless him, said he would come
right over. We drove back out to the pasture to finish burying
Kaiser. I laid him in the grave and Justin and I covered him with
dirt and then covered the grave with rocks. Zach had taken off his
collar and choker. From somewhere he had gotten a little Slim Jim
sausage to put on the grave, a treat too late. All these I laid on
the rocks, and then we four prayed. Through it all Jack and Bear and
Bull, our other dogs, sat quietly by the grave. Impassive and noble,
Jack sat staring into the distance, as if he understood better than
we did.
No sooner did we get back to the barn
than Arnold and his wife Pam pulled up with Billy Willett, who
raises Belgian horses. Shortly Arnold’s daughter Angela and her
husband James arrived. We all pulled and pushed to get General up,
filled him with as much vegetable oil as we could, and walked him.
Around and around, stop for more oil, down he goes, wrestle him up
again, do it all over. The stars watched while we fought. Finally
only Justin and Arnold and I were still awake. General was on his
feet by himself. Someone had to make a decision whether to keep it
up or not. Justin decided General was well enough to leave, and we
agreed.
Sunday morning I dreaded to get out of
bed. I looked out the window, and there lay General. What we’d done
wasn’t enough, but it had been all we could do. We all went to
church.
TO LIVE, WE DIE
Monday morning my friend Charlie Ritch
called. I told him what had happened. On a farm, he said, you are
around life and death daily. Death is not sanitized, not
clinical, but personal. When something dies, you must dig the
hole and put it away, just as our forebears did with their own
family members, on their own property.
On a farm, you can’t hide from death.
And to say that you can’t hide from death is to say, you can’t hide
from God, for every time you face death, you face God.
The urbanized live in a bubble where
everything is controlled and controllable -- virtual reality. Take,
for example, that wry scene in the movie Being There, where
Chance the gardener (Peter Sellers) hits the street for the first
time in his life. His entire adult life has been spent in a bubble,
confined within the walls of an urban garden, seeing only the old
man who owned the house and his maid. Of the world this idiot
savant knew only what he saw on TV, which he watched every
minute he didn’t spend in the garden. He puts on one of the old
man’s fine suits and walks out into the streets of the urban slum
which had long ago surrounded his garden oasis. Several thugs accost
him. By chance he had slipped the TV remote control into his pocket
as he left his room for the last time. When the thieves threaten
him, he stands rigidly unmoved. Without any hint of fear (or any
other emotion), he slips his hand into his pocket, pulls out the
remote control, and starts snicking it at the thugs. Virtual
reality.
When you let animals into your life,
you open yourself to an uncontrolled and uncontrollable reality. You
meet God in person, so to speak. But the same is all the more true
of making friends, or marrying, or having children. You give up all
claim to undisturbed, selfish existence and make yourself
vulnerable. You give your love in pawn – a pawn liable to
reclaiming at any time.
So you climb out of the bubble. You
open yourself to love. And with love comes not only the
possibility of pain, but also the certainty. You open
yourself to the unrestrained mercy of God – for unrestrained
blessing.
What choice have we? To stay in the
climate-controlled bubble of self-love and self-absorption, cut off
from the world, where the prospect of pain is diminished, and the
possibility of joy annihilated?
Return, O my soul,
return to love’s Original, shining so intensely that we
cannot view it, "fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter
of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross,
despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the
throne of God."
Who are we, that he has raised
us to such fellowship with him and his creation?
-- F. Sanders
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