Patterns

Sometimes God just blows me away. And sometimes he uses a horse to do it.

Two days ago, I looked back on a year gone by and felt like I had failed 2014. I had no idea how to move into 2015 other than to simply keep going.

Today, nothing in my circumstances has changed. But today, out at the barn, standing in the bitter wind, God helped me to see that the uncertain road DOES lead back to him, and he used a horse to show me.

Horses, like people, are dominant on one side. Raphi is left-handed. Moving in a counter-clockwise circle is much easier for him and he prefers it when I work on his left side. (I prefer that, too, because I'm right-handed, and when I work on his left side, we're both working on our strong side.) But to be well-balanced and able to carry a rider easily, he needs to be strong on both sides, not just his left side. So today, we practised working to the right. We did clock-wise circles.

Now, I can do clockwise circles with Raphi on a rope, and he does just fine. The rope guides him into the circle. But today I was working without a rope. He understands the concept. Walk in a circle to the right. But while his left circles are neat and tidy, his right circles loop and wander off. He gets to a point where rather than circling right, he tries to turn around and go left. Time and again, we worked at completing a circle to the right. I could see him thinking so hard about what I was asking him to do. It took a lot of effort to do this simple thing: make a circle to the right.

Then I upped the ante. I asked him to trot the circle. He was stiff and sore. The trot was choppy and rough. Muscles that were used to bending and moving to the left fought and resisted the circle to the right. And when I asked for a few steps of the canter, his poor legs didn't know what to do. At one point, he managed to turn around quickly before I could stop him, and head to the left. Immediately, everything smoothed out, and he quickly and easily glided into a beautiful canter. But I didn't want a left-traveling canter. I know he can do that. I wanted him to go right.

He did it, my beautiful boy. He persevered, and he got just a few steps of canter to the right. I was so proud of him.

So what does that have to do with anything? Just this. What I was asking my horse to do was, cognitively, an easy concept. Make a circle around me to the right. Canter to the right. There is absolutely nothing hard to understand about that. Loads of horses do it with ease every day. But for my horse, every step was a struggle. Every muscle is trained to go left. My horse has a pattern. The pattern to canter on the left lead is strong and deep. It is so easy for him to depend on the rope that when the rope is gone and he has to create the circle on his own, he struggles. It is so, so easy for him to follow the old pattern. It feels so right and natural. And it is so difficult, and feels so wrong for him to learn a new pattern, a pattern to make a circle to the right. When he struggles to go right, he's not being stupid. He's not being rebellious. He's just learning a new pattern, and learning a new pattern is hard work when the old patterns are so ingrained.

And out there, in the cold and wind, watching my horse willingly struggle to learn a new pattern simply because I was asking him and he loves me and wants to please me, (and he likes carrots and peppermints a lot) I saw a picture of me and God in 2014.  Maybe it wasn't such a failure after all. Maybe it was a year that the ropes came off. Maybe it was a year of learning new patterns. Maybe it didn't matter so much that the patterns were ugly and choppy and clumsy at best; maybe what mattered was that I was trying. The patterns I am seeking to change are deeply ingrained. It's not surprising it felt like more failure than anything else. I am trying to stretch faith muscles in ways they've never been stretched before.

Which means that the way forward in 2015 is to keep going. Eventually my feet will straighten themselves out, and I'll get a step or two of canter. And then three or four. And someday, the muscles will be strengthened enough that they will have learned a new pattern.

"Give me eyes to see when my heart is blind,
That when I ask You'll give, that when I seek I'll find,
Give me ears to hear when my way's confused,
Let the uncertain road, still lead me back to You."

I think it's a prayer he's already answered.