I read an Erwin McManus book once in which he made a statement that went something like this: "Absolute power does not corrupt. Absolute power reveals." This was based on the fact that God is all-powerful, but God is also good. Absolute power has not corrupted Him. Therefore, absolute power reveals the inherent goodness or evil of the possessor.
That popped into my head just now because of a series of incidents that happened on the farm last week. I am not proud of it, but it was an important lesson for me. God hasn't given me absolute power. He gave me cows. And it seems that He has a way of using them to expose darkness within me that has yet to be replaced with light.
The story begins in the middle of May, and Tansy the cow had her first baby, a heifer calf. Tansy is a nice-looking cow, pretty good disposition, good milking potential, so her calf will probably make a good milk cow one day, too. The problem was, she was born about 6 weeks after the first calves started coming and when the age span is too big on a seasonal dairy, the young ones can fall behind their herdmates in growth after weaning, as well as being smaller at breeding the following year. So I debated, "Do I sell her now or keep her? Sell her or keep her?" I finally opted to hold on to her.
Fast-forward to June 22. We had separated the calves the day before, after putting the weaning rings in their noses a few days earlier to break the nursing habit. Unfortunately a handful of the calves had figured out how to nurse in spite of their new jewelry, and Tansy's calf Twyla had lost hers twice so I didn't bother putting it back in a second time. The morning after separating, I woke up to hear cows bawling and discovered the calves had managed to get the gate off the hinge and some had been reunited with their mamas. All of those were ones that had still been nursing, including Twyla. The others were across the road, fairly contentedly looking at the remaining bawling mamas! That was a lot of extra work to go through that morning, but we got them separated again and fixed the hinge problem.
The next morning as I was getting the cows in I realized I heard a cow, not just calves, bawling up at the weaning pen. It was Tansy. She had jumped through or over more than one electric fence to get up there. Dad found her and brought her down the lane to the milking parlor. She was milked and sent back out with the others. Before I finished hosing down the lot after milking, she was back in and went through the fence...and another...and another...and another... and was back up the road within minutes.
By this time, I was starting to get a little disgusted with her lack of respect for the fences. I should also mention that I was getting extremely tired from not enough sleep recently and my emotional reserves were just about shot. If you've ever seen Aladdin, where Genie is disguised as a bee while his master is trying to woo Princess Jasmine and she is trying to trip him up, Genie sees what's coming and starts the sirens and beeping, yelling, "WARNING! WARNING! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!"...as he crashes and burns. Yeah, Tansy needed a bee like that. Or maybe I did.
So dad and I joined forces and we got her back in the lane. I tried to keep her moving straight ahead, but before we got all the way down to the other barn, she went through the fence again and I could not keep her from running back up through the field. If blood can boil in a body, mine was then. My rage exploded in the form of shouted threats of violence of a terminal nature to the cow (she was completely oblivious, of course, maybe for the best), followed by angry sobbing.
In the end, we loaded her on the stock trailer and she spent the next 20-some hours in solitary confinement. Rather quietly, too. The next day she bawled a bit, but stayed where she was supposed to.
As I confessed my stupid antics to my friend the other day, she said if she was a farmer she'd just end up letting them all stay together because she wouldn't have the heart to separate them. "All she wanted was to be with her baby." Yep, Tansy was just following her God-given maternal instincts. I gave in to some carnal instincts, which was beneficial in no way except to release steam in the heat of the moment. And really, it's embarrassing to admit and even think about what I sounded like to anyone who happened to be within earshot.
Well, the ironic thing about all this is that I sold Twyla yesterday. A man who has been buying my summer heifer calves was wanting more of them. Twyla wasn't as fat as the other calves and I knew there was a chance she might not keep growing as fast as the rest of them in the group so I thought I'd let her go somewhere that she'd get some special individual treatment and do just fine.
When the fact hit home that I could have avoided the biggest part of the grief of last week if I'd have just sold her soon after birth, I had a moment of regret. But then the thought occurred to me that in all likelihood, God had just used this calf and her mama to reveal another place of darkness in my soul that he wants to heal and transform. And honestly, when situations like this happen on the farm, it's always in concert with other triggers like fatigue and emotional stress. In other words, it goes deeper than disobedient cows. Disobedient cows don't corrupt, they reveal! Well, sometimes they corrupt, but that's another story, and the corruption is with their herdmates, not their shepherd...
Like Paul describes in Romans 7, there are times when I do what I don't want to do and what I want to do, I don't. God knows all this and continues to patiently wait for me to walk all the way out into the River (Ezekiel 47) so He can have His way in me, probably knowing all the while I am my own worst enemy. He is not holding last week against me, and has probably already chosen to forget it, although He still desires to help me work through the root causes for the anger and hurt in the first place.
So there you have it. Proof that I'm still a work in progress.
