PUSH!!!
Whew! Here it is - a bouncing baby blog! Isn't it cute?
I do have something to say. Really. That's what I was waiting for, all last year, as I tried to decide whether or not I was truly meant to be a Blog Mom. So here it is - got your notebooks ready?
ARE YOU A DONKEY OR A STEER?
This year my husband and I are reading an old devotional book written in 1968, and this morning's reading told a story about a donkey and a steer. Now mind you, this is a horrible story from the human perspective, and I think the "cowpunchers" should be taken out and shot. But the story does have an interesting moral.
Seems these two cowpunchers went out in the desert to chase down an errant steer. They took a little donkey with them. When they found the steer, went to all the work of lassoing him and everything, did they haul him home again?
No, they tied him to the donkey with a stout rope and went back home the easy way, riding their ponies and strumming their guitars.
Okay, it's true, I'm embellishing a little here. But really! Don't you feel sorry for this poor little donkey?
Well, about a week later, the donkey showed up at the ranch, leading a tame steer. How did she do it? Every time the steer threw her, she got up and took another step toward home. Every time the steer dragged her through the cacti, she got up and took another step toward home. Every time the steer pulled her in the opposite direction, she dug in her heels until he got tired, and then she turned around and took one more step toward home.
The devotional (which did not go into all this detail, you understand) ended this way: "With every failure, then, arise and take another step toward the kingdom, and one day you will appear at heaven's sparkling gates, battle scarred perhaps,"
"but serene in the security of the Master's presence."
Two pictures appeared in my mind. One was of Ready to Halt and his crippled friend, in Pilgrim's Progress, stumbling on crutches into the Blessed Land. I always did identify with them. The other was a passage in my journal during the dark years now blessedly behind me, which read something like this: "I lie face down in the mud, too sick and exhausted to rise. Yet I cannot lie here, when perhaps the finish line is six inches beyond my fingertips, and the enemy is nearby, laughing. 'Do not rejoice over me, oh my enemy. I can stand up one more time than you can knock me down.'" (The Debbonnaire Standard Version of Micah 7:8)
La question du jour, then: Are you a donkey, or a steer?
Important note: Either way, you get tamed in the end!
Restoring the Breach,
Debbonnaire
quotation from Come Unto Me, by E. E. Cleveland, Review and Herald Publishing Association, Washington, D. C.
