Little One died in August. Our paint gelding laid down in the pasture and didn’t get up again, leaving a big hole in the barn where our goofy, curious boy once was. His passing left Madera, my bay Quarter Horse, alone for the first time in her life, and we all worried about how she would handle the isolation. Horses are herd animals and don’t do well on their own, so after some contemplation, we started the slow search for a new companion.
After many evenings browsing the website of our local large animal shelter, my dad found a seemingly perfect answer: Tink and Flicka, whose pictures he sent me right away. Flicka is a big white mare with large, deep eyes, and Tink is a tiny, adorable dwarf horse with a voluminous forelock that covers her whole face. They belonged to an elderly woman who passed away in the spring, but no one knew or remembered that she had these beautiful girls, so they waited alone in a pasture for eight months before someone found them, blessedly before a brutal winter.
Of course, we had to bring them home to the farm. They had a couple of weeks to get to know us and the barn and Madera before our first big Pennsylvania snowstorm. As I write this, fat flakes of lake effect snow are stacking on the three feet already on the ground. Unfortunately, horses do about as well being cooped up in the barn as we do being stuck in the house, and it didn’t take long for tensions to rise. It started with nips and pinned ears at the feeder and turned into the much larger Flicka chasing Madera out of the barn altogether.
As a result, I spent much of yesterday standing in the barn playing mediator between these two-ton giants and wondering why they so jealously guarded resources from each other. I longed to tell Flicka that there was a whole barn full of hay—more than enough to get her through all the storms between now and the lush pastures of spring. And then I thought about all the times God longs to tell us exactly the same thing when we worry. He watches us pace and pin our ears and look at seemingly scarce resources with wide eyes of fear and longs to place a calming hand on our heads and whisper, “It’s okay, I know more about what’s to come than you do. I will take care of you.”
I’m trying to listen better to that voice as the narrative of scarcity fights so well for space in my mind. Over the summer I started a new relationship, and in the joy and wonder and adventure there have also been moments of such fear, because I’m filled with joy, and that feels unsafe. Brené Brown says that joy is the most vulnerable emotion, and she is so right. To feel this much joy seems unwise, imprudent, out of sync with a reality that holds so much pain and brokenness.
Especially here, at the tail end of my twenties, where I experienced so much grief and uncertainty at the hands of my body, it is difficult for me to trust joy. But as is so often the case, God gifted me the words of a poet to guide me through the early days of elation and panic. Mary Oliver’s “Don’t Hesitate” became the refrain of my heart, and has made a safe landing place when I need to be reminded that “joy is not made to be a crumb.”
And when we brought another round bale in for the horses to share and enjoy, I could see the image of God providing from sources and wells that we can’t see or imagine. I could feel his hand on my fretful heart and his blessing on this season of joy. Sometimes you’re allowed to be happy. Sometimes it’s just a really good, beautiful gift from a God who breathes joy into his creation every day, all the time. Our job is to trust the joy, follow it back to its source, and eschew our hesitation when worldly prudence tells us to imagine all the ways it could go wrong. The hay keeps coming, even in the storm. Praise God, so does the joy.
Ansley Kelly (’16) makes her home in Rochester, NY, where she delights in short, sweet summers spent sailing and long winters spent skiing at her favorite mountain. Between outdoor adventures, you can find her buying books more quickly than she can read them and indulging in mid-morning naps. She works for Wegmans Food Markets where she finds purpose and joy in feeding her community and the wider world.
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The beauty of this story and the metaphor it points to, make me want to cry. I am well acquainted with the fear of scarcity. I have felt like I was forgotten in a pasture watching snow clouds gather on the horizon, and I have been surprised by joy when God opened His unseen barn and dropped bales of blessing on me. May Flicka and I both learn to relax into the love of he who adopted us.
When Jesus taught us to pray for DAILY bread (and no more) it must have seemed a that he wasn’t trusting God for much. Why not give us this day a lifetime of bread, or at least a Costco-sized cart full? But the more assured we are of food, the less we are in wonder of it and the less we are grateful for it. The wisdom of Jesus’s prayer is that it focuses our attention on the here and now. Planning for the future can be prudent. But trust is a daily necessity. Thanks for the reminder, Ansley.