“Trusting the Hand on the Reins”

If you ride much – or if perhaps you used to ride a good bit in the past – than you already know that one the greatest risks in riding a young horse is over the way they tend to shy at things that frighten them. It might be a mailbox, or a piece of paper blowing by, or any number of things that spook them and cause them to behave in an unpredictable fashion.
A number of years ago, back when we were boarding our horses down the road, Susan and I had gone out for a ride on a nice fall afternoon. We had a pretty good ride that day - and by that I mean that we had lived through it - and were most of the way back down the ditch alongside the driveway leading into the yard, when my horse stepped on a cattle fence that someone had left in the high grass. Now that might not have been a problem, except that my horse had shoes on, and the back edge caught a corner of the fence so that as he raised his foot the fence both pulled on him and came up out of the grass - and I’m sure he thought it was going to eat him. He just “broke in two”, bucking up out of the ditch, across the driveway, and into the ditch on the other side. Frankly, I didn’t know he had it in him. Anyway, about that time I decided to get off - or at least that’s my story! Fear responses can simply be dangerous.
There are a couple approaches that you can take to try to overcome this sort of response. The first thing that you can do is de-sensitize your horse to as much as possible. By that I mean you expose your horse to as many different frightening things as you can - starting slowly with things that aren't too scary - and only reward your horse by removing the scary object when he finally stops moving and relaxes. By and large when you see someone advertise a horse as bomb-proof the seller means that this horse has been exposed to – and become accustomed to – pretty much everything you might encounter on a ride (cars, trucks, tractors, 4-wheelers, mailboxes, dogs, plastic bags, gun shots, etc.).
But there’s a second approach that you’ll often find some of the very best clinicians advocating – and I mean the people who seem to be able to look deeper inside a horse and recognize exactly where it is at and what it needs in that moment. These folks suggest that rather than working on the horse (de-sensitizing it) we should be working on the rider. What they mean is that if the horse trusts the rider – if the horse has come to understand that the rider knows what he or she is doing – if the horse believes that the rider cares for it and is it’s leader and protector, the horse will do pretty much anything the rider asks without fear because it knows it is in good hands!
And I can’t help but wonder, as we stand only a few days into a new year, whether or not our own response to God’s leading might not also depend upon how much we are willing to trust the One whose hands are on the reins in our lives?
Robert Sutton recalls a television program that preceded the Winter Olympics some years ago that featured blind skiers being trained for slalom skiing, as impossible as that may sound. Paired with sighted skiers, the blind skiers were taught on the flats how to make right and left turns. When that was mastered, they were taken to the slalom slope, where their sighted partners skied beside them shouting, "Left!" and "Right!" As they obeyed the commands, they were able to negotiate the course and cross the finish line, depending solely on the sighted skiers' word. It was either complete trust or catastrophe.
Sutton suggests that this is a vivid picture of the Christian life - except that we are the ones who are in reality blind and can only make our way to safety as we listen to, and heed, God’s guidance.
As you make your way through 2009, you really have two choices. You can buck & shy, fighting for your head as you plunge blindly in the darkness of the unknown. Or you can trust the hand on the reins of the One who loves you and who can see what you cannot.
(Excerpted from a Cowboy Church message on January 4th)