We're back in the cattle business.

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These aren't them, but we bought a couple of calves last month to keep our acreage grazed down. Actually, we bought three, but...well, it's a long frustrating story involving my poor city-clicker husband, so I won't go into it. Suffice it to say that we have two calves physically present on the place.

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One is already gentling down to the grain bucket, but the other is a spooky little thing. One glimpse of a human being sends him flying to the other side of the pasture. But he does like grain, so as soon as I retreat, here he comes.

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You'd think after watching the daily equation of:

human+bucket=yummy grain

he'd catch on that I'm not the enemy. But so far, he still thinks I'm Godzilla and that somehow the grain magically appears when I do. He has no idea how much more of that grain is available to him if he'd stop fearing me and come closer.

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As I watched him bolt away from the feed today, tipping the bucket and spilling most of it on the ground, it reminded me of how many times we do that to God.

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He is the giver of every good thing in our lives. We don't mind praying and asking for all kinds of things, hoping and believing He'll give them to us. Yet whenever we sense that He's about to draw near and require something of us, we bolt. We cling to the unfounded fear that He might be scary. Might harm us. His will might involve doing something we don't want to do.

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We stand wide-eyed across the pasture, watching and wondering if He's gonna come after us, chase us down, and bring hurtful "lessons" our way. When all he wants to do is gentle us, feed us, and work on our behalf.

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No wonder the Bible so often compares us to animals. You can learn a lot about yourself from watching them.

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Do you bolt when God gets too close to your special holdout? Are you afraid to let him search your heart too closely? Are you tipping over your own feed bucket?

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