Our horses, Caspian and Gabby
The other day Jerry and I found ourselves at the crossroads of selling or keeping our horses. We love them, but honestly, they are large and expensive pets. Given half a chance, they would crawl up into our laps and snuggle down for a long winter’s nap. The decision shouldn’t have been that hard, but in trying to determine what to do, thoughts of when we had to say good-bye to other family animals flooded our hearts making for an arduous and difficult task.
Have you ever been face-to-face with an imminent decision when out of nowhere, standing before you is a forgotten moment that was lived five minutes, five years, or even a lifetime ago? We truly don’t see them coming do we? Practically staring us in the face, sometimes emerging from veiled shadows and crevasses of our past, or fresh out of our present bolting headlong into our futures, are our memories. For good or bad they invariably affect us, swinging from an uneasy feeling in our stomach to a sense of euphoric sunshine for no obvious reason at all. But they’re always with us.
Some are delightful—those childhood times of sweet, summer days that in our innocence we flitted away like a butterfly moving from flower to flower, and some, more closely resembling an ominous storm cloud thundering threats on the horizon. But either way, like a hermit crab, that as it grows needs a larger shell for its increasing size, we steadily are adding to our mental diaries, and whether we mean to or not, are constantly analyzing and compartmentalizing the good with the bad. Our memories, alive and well, direct our lives more times than we want. And so we go, often standing before the same door we are eternally trying to walk through.
Jerry and I have a friend whom we dearly love that we quote all the time. His mantra seems to be, and you can almost hear it in Eeeyore’s voice, “If you keep making the same mistakes then you keep getting the same results.” The heart wrenching truth of that gold nugget is that we all do just that, over…and over…and over…and over. Have you ever seen a mockingbird go after your car’s side view mirror? Slamming into it with a vengeance, it will not stop. Like those birds, we too, won’t give up. We hit that same stonewall of making the same mistakes, again and again.
But Jesus knows that about us. He is not ever surprised about our endless capabilities to land us in the most tangled web we have ever experienced. He asks Paul about it on the road to Damascus. (See Acts 9:5) But, thankfully, Jesus is here to save and pick us up from the mire and the mess. He tells us, “I am the way, the truth, and the life….” (John 14:6, NLT)
And finally, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32, NLT)
So He can take all the intricacies that come with being alive—happy, sad, elated, dejected, to just name a few—the rollercoaster going up and down, spinning around, gut wrenching, adrenaline pumping, mixing us all up. He can take all that confusion, and if we will let Him, will form and shape us into who we were created to be. Like rocks in a tumbler, in the end, a beautiful gem revealed.
Just as Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” (NLT)
We can all trust God in our circumstances, in everything, Him giving us…beauty for ashes. “To all who mourn in Israel, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the Lord has planted for his own glory.” (Isaiah 61:3, NLT)
Where did we land regarding our horses? We hope to find them a beautiful home, acres of green pastures, and someone to love them as much as we do.
Gabby
Caspian
Kimberly
