The Three Goats from Hell

My dream of owning land has finally come true. Sure, it’s along a busy highway, under the approach to the runway of the Fortuna airport, next to the railroad tracks, and on the side of a steep hill but it’s still land—God’s, the bank’s, and mine. I sometimes walk over to the little orchard planted too close to the overshadowing redwoods and sugar pines and pick a diminutive apple or pear and eat it with the relish that only landowners know. Munching between the holes and bites already made by other critters, I smile deep inside, acknowledging that God and I made that pear grow. Isn’t it good?

But with this expansive, Lord-of-the-domain feeling also comes the awareness of having to care for the place. Oh, I wish I had cut those huge, thistly-looking purple flowers before they exploded into the seedy beginnings of next year’s weeds. And what about keeping the grass and brush down? Horses have no income-producing value but would be so much fun. Cows would work very well with the sketchy fencing I have but eating them wouldn’t be very good for my cholesterol. Goats would eat the brush, poison oak, and grass just fine but my fencing isn’t adequate. Oh, what to do, what to do. I really don’t have much time to spend on this, with pastoring a new church and so many people to visit.

So you can see why I would be delighted to look out one morning to see three little white goats munching contentedly on my thistles and weeds down in my lower field. I later went down to visit them and we negotiated a fifteen-foot relationship consisting of my talking soothing nonsense and their staring at me blankly and chewing. It was so country! I immediately began praising God for taking care of even this smallest of needs.

The next day the furry threesome felt more comfortable and ventured even closer. After a couple of days I looked out my bedroom window and the three cute goats were kneeling in the shade of the nearby maple tree looking as comfortable as could be. What have I done to be so loved by God and so blessed without even asking?

The next day I noted with satisfaction that the goats came even closer. They were eating the patch of weeds watered by the leech lines in front of my house, where the rains will eventually reveal a lawn. The goats looked extremely well fed. I walked gently around them toward my tiny orchard to grab a pear for Suzanne and an apple for myself. The solitary red delicious apple I had been leaving to grow a little bigger near the top of an otherwise bare dwarf tree was missing! It screamed of violence like a bank vault door hanging crookedly off its hinges. My apple was missing!

And my pears—the whole tree full—were all gone, except for a few half-eaten ones! The upper branches were broken and hanging down at sickly angles. And those blasted goats, looking bloated, smiled nearby and practically belched with satisfaction. Later that evening my neighbor stopped by and said the highway patrol had found those same three goats stopping traffic on Highway 36 after having almost caused who-knows-how-many accidents.

Why do we interpret anything that appears to be positive as a blessing from God when the same blessing may soon turn out to be a curse? It occurs to me that instead of relying on the better hope the scriptures promise, we let our spirituality hang in the balance of day-to-day events. If this or that happens in my favor God is blessing me. It suddenly seems more mature to keep in mind …for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45).

God promises that all things work toward our good, if we love Him. We need not ride the crest of positive events as if they are evidence of God’s love in our lives any more than we should allow the negative events, the death and disease which surround us, to become indicators of God’s disfavor. Let the goats in our life be neither the goats from God nor the goats from hell. Let them simply be goats, and let God be God, yearning to lead us home, and able to use ANY circumstances in our life to our long-term advantage. Isn’t that the real miracle?

 

Little Cracks Let in Big Storms

The electricity was out to the north and to the south of us. Our windows shook with the force of the wind funneled through the Van Duzen River valley. A sliding glass door had been mistakenly left open three quarters of an inch. Through that crack the wind was able to create a pressure vacuum causing the large windowpanes in the living room to bend inward and then back outward as the wind blew and sucked.

I sat there watching the increasingly drastic stress on the windows, at times expecting the pane to completely give way. The previous owner, in order to save some money, had replaced some broken double pane windows with single panes of glass held in place with double-sided tape. Knowing about the flimsy method of attaching the glass aroused my imagination as to what may happen if the winds blew any harder. Finally, I noticed the slightly open door and closed it. The windstorm continued to howl outside but we were safe and the house became quiet and calm.
Leaving little things undone, like closing the door all the way, makes our peace and security so much more vulnerable to the winds of strife. Things like that seem so small and petty and we wonder why we should have to bother with such trivial details. But, when we find ourselves watching the glass walls of our lives bulge inward and flex outward, like they are going to burst, it is a relief when we notice the cause and can fix the problem so easily.

How much time do we waste in worry and want because of small neglects, little matters of diet and exercise, details in tithes and offerings, consistency in devotionals and prayer? How much more rested and more successful in the important things in our lives would we be if we didn’t have to stress over the commotion caused by the neglect of small details? Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier [matters] of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone (Matthew 23:23). For who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10).