The Long Way Home

Evening’s Last Chore

During a weekend long storm, there was 6” of dusty snow on the ground, a light wind, more snow falling, and the sun was setting behind the clouds.  As my very tired eyes scanned the landscape, I saw two cows in a neighbor’s field.  It hadn’t been fenced all season, so those cows were definitely out.  My sight darted across the road to our fence.  Sure enough, an insulator was missing.

I circled around nice and wide to push them back home, but they were stubborn.  It reminded me of how we are as people when being told what to do.  We don’t like redirection and get especially high-headed when it is someone else pushing us into it.  Those cows kept pushing back and trying to run around me.  The more I hustled around one, the quicker the other would get back.

Facing off with these two girls, I thought one had lost a tag, damnit.  Then I noticed both of them only had one tag, and those single tags were a bit more teal than ours.  These weren’t our cows at all!  I was relieved to know that our fence was fine, but felt bad for the neighbor whose two cows were far from home.

Going Home

Change of plans.  Rather than pushing them 50 feet to the east back into our field (which would have been far easier at the time), I instead would trail them maybe a quarter mile to the west.  No more struggling to get them together, making them go the right way, or keeping up pace, they decided it was time to go home too.  Then I thought about how often we often find ourselves pushed into things that don’t feel right, or simply aren’t right, and that’s when it takes a pretty big person to turn around and go the other way.  Cows just want to go home, but we were granted these amazing thinking and reasoning skills, and to use them honorably is a big responsibility.  That can come with troubles as we have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing since, in our sinful nature, they don’t often coincide.  As I followed them on the always saddled, always ready, and easy-on-the-”feed”-bill, trusty steed that we call the 4-Wheeler, getting snow in my face, eyes watering, my forehead so cold it burned, I was amazed how easily they knew their way back home, paying no attention to the distance or time.  With an instinct to get home--to safety, they trotted across two different fields, over pivot trenches, around an irrigation pond, down a farm road, bending through and around a few power poles, and eventually making it back to their pasture’s water tank.  I lowered just one insulator, and in they went.  Back home safe and sound just as the darkness fell.

I began the long ride home.  I could have easily just left the cows when I realized they weren’t ours.  I would’ve been back in home before dark, starting dinner in our nice warm house, but the 50 feet would have then been a much longer ride home.  However, when treating them like they were my own and sending them home, the long way ended up being the better way because it was the right way.  Easily said but certainly not as easily done.  Once I decided that I would trail them home, it did however come naturally to all three of us.

The Long Way

Having to take the extra time to go that long route only came naturally from years of having been trained to take extra precautions, not shy away from a little hard work, and of course it helped that it was the way the cows wanted to go even if it was longer.  Taking the shortcut might have looked appealing, especially when I can spit far enough to reach it, but when something just isn’t right, you can feel it.  We all could.  Those cows knew it wasn’t right as they pushed against me and as I tried to push them (unknowingly) the wrong way.  Taking any shortcut, we find ourselves fighting an uphill battle, and we try to remind ourselves that it will be over sooner.  But rushing through anything doesn’t allow us the time to take pride in it, and inevitability, it almost always makes more work in the long run.  Had those girls not been so stubborn and hopped into our pasture, I would have been done more quickly, and they’d go on chewing their cud just the same, but tomorrow I’d have another issue of figuring out their owner--not to mention risking new or different lice or disease brought into our herd and onto our field.  So, when they pushed back because it was against their better instinct, not only did they end up in their own pasture which was good for me, but it helped a neighbor, literally doing unto another as I would like have done to myself.  

Taking the time to do things how they’re supposed to be done, even when it takes longer, works best in the long run.  There must be something within us that wants to do right, but our stubborn selves want to take shortcut, like we think we are so clever.  But no.  The sooner we realize we can’t one up the Big Man’s plan, and even if it is longer, doing something the right way pays off in the end.