A few evenings ago we saw a cow standing by the pasture fence who didn’t come in with the rest of the herd for pellets, so we drove down to investigate. There was a newborn calf on the other side of the barb wire and she looked like she’d had a calf that day so we assumed it was hers.
Bob had to put on his gloves as the baby was covered in stickers. Then while mama pawed the ground and made threatening sounds, he pushed the little guy under the fence toward her. Baby scrambled straight to the milk station, but then a strange thing happened. The cow began butting him away and acting like he wasn’t hers. After he’d been beaten into the dust a few times and given up, we decided we’d made a mistake. Maybe he wasn’t hers after all? Maybe hers was somewhere else and she’d just become confused?
It was too dark by now to search, so Bob loaded and held him on the back of the pick-up as I drove home. In our little orphan pen, Bob continued to remove more of the nasty stickers as I mixed up the colostrum milk. Thankfully, the little guy’s sucking instinct was still strong and he hungrily devoured the whole bottle.
Next morning we went back to search for another mother or calf. After finding neither we brought that reluctant mama to the pens and began the arduous task of trying to mate them back up. We felt so sorry for that baby who just wanted nourishment and a mother’s love and so disgusted with that rejecting cow. But after several trips to the milking chute and liberal doses of ONOMO (a mothering up powder) on her nose and his body, that evening she finally decided she liked him again!
We have concluded that the whole problem was probably the stickers. She had birthed him, cleaned him up, and then he got on the other side of the fence into the sticker patch sometime during the day. She knew he was hers and became frantic to get to him, but then when he did reach her, she sniffed him and got a nose full of those irritating thorns. Her maternal instinct was evidently not strong enough to overcome that pain, so she pushed him away.
It made me think about God’s unshakable love for us. He brings us into the world clean, pure, and soft but at some point we all go over the fence and fall into life’s sticker patches…maybe even wallow in them. What a blessing that our Creator doesn’t give up on us or push us away when we come back to Him wanting love and forgiveness!
I especially like the Message translation of this thought in Eph. 2:4-5
We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
Thanks Lord, for taking us back, filth, stickers, and all!
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