Lessons from the Barn

There are a few things that can be heard at the barn on any given day. These include calling the horses in, Prince meowing at you becuase he wants his food, or Puzzles, the donkey braying at you because you clearly forgot to give him the rest of the hay bale. Something else you can often hear at the barn is something that sounds like this...”No, you’re okay. It’s just a tarp, it won’t eat you, I promise. You can walk past it, it’s okay.”

If you’ve ever worked with horses before, you very quickly realized that they can be scared of the strangest things. From a squirrel jumping in the trees, to a tarp blowing in the wind, the yoga ball in the catch pen, and even their own shadow following them. While we see all of those things and know that they are not scary, when a horse sees them they think that they are a scary monster that will jump out and eat them. It takes a lot of encouragement and patience from the rider for the horse to understand that what is scaring them is in fact not scary at all, and that they need to move past it to get where they’re supposed to be going.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my time working in the barn here at camp, it’s that I’m a lot more like the horses I work with than I’d care to admit. I also don’t like to do things that scare me, and I’d much rather stay in a place that I know is nice and safe; a place where all of my friends are and I’m not out somewhere alone. The horses that I’ve worked with have taught me that sometimes we are so stressed that we are unable to see things clearly, and as a result we get scared of things that shouldn’t scare us at all. One of the reasons that horses get so scared is because they are prey animals, so they are used to running away from other things that are trying to eat them. As a rider, our job is to build a strong enough relationship with our horse that they trust us to know what will and will not hurt them. This trust is the key to getting your horse past whatever is scaring them; if they don’t trust you they won’t believe you when you tell them that it’ll all be okay.

The same is true for us. We have to have a strong relationship built with God, so that we can trust that it’ll all be okay. However, your horse can trust you to the ends of the earth and back, but they still might get scared of things. Now that doesn’t mean that suddenly they don’t trust you anymore and that you’re whole relationship has crumbled. It simply means that their natural instincts are taking over, and that they are getting so caught up in their head and what they’re feeling that they have blinded themselves to the fact that you still have it all in control. The very same thing is true of us. When chaos creeps into our lives, we forget that God has it all in control and we start to panic and freak out, because there’s no way that we could ever survive this on our own. Thankfully though, we are never alone. Just like a horse has its herd and its rider, God has given us a community of people to help us through whatever comes along and he is always there with us, guiding us through the good times and the bad.

I have to say that working with scared horses is probably one of my favourite parts of my job. I love being able to show a horse that not only is something not scary, but also that they are brave enough to get past it. Getting to see a horse slowly become more confident in themselves and seeing that relationship form between the two of us is just amazing. That’s one of the other things that I love so much about the Christian community, and especially here at camp, is that I not only get to encourage horses to move through their fears but I also get to encourage people to do the same. The fact that God can use something like horses to teach us more about himself and our relationship with him is truly amazing.

Until next time,

Faves (Katherina)