I came in from the morning chores sobbing. I had just seen inside the evil heart of man and was sick to my stomach. I reported it, but I don't know if justice was ever served in his lifetime or if it followed him after.
At 6:00 AM every morning, I was up and out in the barn ready to begin the milking. On this particular morning, I had what should have been the wonderful privilege of watching the birthing of a calf. The mother moaned and groaned and the hooves of the calf appeared. She was definitely struggling and so the old farmer tied some rope around the hooves and began yanking and pulling trying to help the mother with her delivery. She was moaning real loud now and it began to look like this wasn't going to be a normal delivery. Eventually the calf slid out onto the floor of the barn and the relieved mother began licking the wet slimy body. The calf was a little slow standing up and before I knew, it the farmer had grabbed the calf and was forcing his head into a can of milk cussing under his breath. The calf wasn't catching on and the farmer gave the calf a swift kick in the ribs. "Drink you sorry SOB", he shouted. I had just turned fifteen and wasn't sure what I should do.
This was my first real job. My dad had met the farmer in the market and had felt that the farm would be a great summer experience for me. "I'll pay the lad $60.00 per month plus room and board" the old guy had said. It meant I got to live on the farm with the farmer’s son and help with the haying and drive the tractors and all kinds of cool things.
Growing up I loved farming. A farm set was the only thing I had asked for Christmas after Christmas, at least a half dozen years. The farm set always looked so amazing in that Sears and Robucks catalog but even the small sets were more than mom and dad could afford. Our typical Christmas stockings were a large orange and apple with some candy and a pair of socks. There were some good years too, like the year we got a new toboggan and the year we all got skates, but mostly we got a new set of long johns and a fresh supply of underwear and socks. On my thirteenth Christmas my folks heard about a used farm set through a radio call in trade show. By then I had really out grown the desire and it had been a couple of years since a farm set had been anywhere near my wish list, so when I opened my gift hoping for a new suit, I was a little disappointed. But I knew it had come with great sacrifice and I staged a big smile. While my desire for the farm set might have faded, my excitement for farming never did.
I had the opportunity of a life time, and with $60,00 per month for two months, by the end of summer I could buy me a brand new suit, maybe even a three piece suit with a vest. It was a 6AM to 9PM job with every other Sunday off and most of the days were filled with sweat and adventure. I loved driving the tractors. Haying was a blast and when we were combining my days were spent loading, driving and unloading bags of oats. Once we had emptied the combine I would swing down off the bed of the truck bed into the cab and I would head off to the barn to unload. Then quick, back out to the field just as the combine was filling up again. All day, I drove the truck back and forth from the barn to the combine.
I went to bed exhausted. All night long I would wake myself up, running into the wall on the side of my bed and discover that my pillows were stacked neatly at the front of the bed. In my dream I was filling the bags with oats from the shoot on the combine, tying them and stacking them at the front of the truck bed, apparently at the front of my bed. After about the fifth time of waking myself by hitting the wall, I just stayed awake until dawn. That was the morning I got to witness the calf being born.
It wasn't the first time I had witnessed the farmer beat up on the cows; in fact all of the cows tails were twisted and crooked. If the cows responded poorly to his cold hands or gruffness, he would grab their tails and twist them. I had never seen such cruelty to animals and that early summer morning I had the wretched experience of watching that evil man kick that new born calf to death. To this day I regret that I just stood there and watched. I wished I had taken the steel bar that he used often on the cows and given him a taste of his own medicine but it wouldn’t have solved a thing. He was obviously a brocken man who understood little of grace.
I know now that when we live less loved every one and every thing around us suffers. As I've grown older I have come to know that when sin is left unchecked in us - those inside and outside of the church walls – we and all of creation around us, suffers. Scripture says "The earth is crying, groaning as in birth, waiting for the manifestation of those who have learned to live loved - God's true children.
No comments:
Post a Comment