AN ADAGE A DAY- ENCOURAGEMENT
All Things Horses
By Carole Gilbert
2 Corinthians 12:10 says,
“For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses,
insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities.
For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
I want to focus on the last sentence of this verse. It does sound negative, somewhat discouraging, and even a little hard to comprehend. It’s meant to. It’s a paradox, meaning it sounds contradictory within itself. Some adages or sayings are paradoxes, and we must take them with a grain of salt. Let the chips fall where they may, so to speak. So, using all this information, I want to share a story about a time I was just horsing around. This idiom is mostly meant to be negative but in my situation it was not. I did feel weak, but afterwards I felt strong, just like the verse says. And believe me, I was praying hard before and thanking God with all I had after. I still can’t believe I did it. What did I do? I was just horsing around with my granddaughters. Literally!
The irony of this story is that it can also come “straight from the horse’s mouth,” being my horse that I rode for an hour at 64 years old. I never was a horse person. I’ve only ridden horses a few times in my life. But “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” from horsing around with my grands.
I picked the girls up on spring break for a few days. My oldest granddaughter had talked before about wanting to ride a horse and she brought it up again. I thought we were “putting the cart before the horse” since the weather had been so up and down between hot and cold with high winds. But before we got to my house, she had found a couple places close to us where we could have horse rides, along trails, totally on a horse by ourselves. No wagon, no hayride, just the big, full-grown, horse!
I thought, “What? Hold your horses! I need to think about this. And it’s 50 degrees.”
But as their grandma, how could I let them down? I “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” which means to look critically at something given to you, to see if it’s a good deal. And I know a good deal when I see it. Any time I’m with my grands is a good deal, a true blessing.
I started praying hard for God to lead this whole endeavor and off to the saddled horses we went. It was an hour ride on trails with a few dry deep creek beds. As we went on the trails, we were going slow and then the first creek bed came along. None of us expected the horses to run down and then up the beds; but they did, and we quickly learned how to hold on to the horses for dear life with all our might, and all our bodies. I can honestly say each of us was sore when we were done, for days. But it was such a wonderful experience! I know we all loved it and felt so rewarded, so strong, that we had withstood the ride. And we’re ready to do it again.
I’ve always heard it said, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I felt like I’d been led to the water that day. I felt weak. But I did drink, and I’m so glad I did! That ride made me feel strong and totally guided by God. And I’m not just horsing around.