Bull Fighting Sunday

Calving is picking up steam out here and I just wished it would be about twenty degrees warmer, cause it sure is a below normal year temp wise up here in the north country. There’s still a few snow drifts hanging tough as I write at the end of April and the pens have plenty of mud in em too. But you gotta do what you gotta do in this business or else get out. And being that I have no intention of getting out just yet I gotta just get out there and do the job. It seems like if something out of the ordinary is going to happen it’ll happen on a Sunday and yesterday was no exception to that. Got some of the cattle feeding done and was going to haul out a few loads of mud out of the main cow pen. They don’t live in that pen, just come in there every morning for some silage that I haul in there from the silage pit a ways away. While loading swill into the manure spreader, which can handle swill, I noticed my cur dawg looking intently in the direction behind me and I knew something was up for her to stand at attention like that. And there was.

The bulls, five of them, were fighting and wouldn’t you know it, they were tearing down our old post and plank fence at a fast rate. Now being a preacher on the side I was dreaming up to that moment about the Sunday evening service I was gonna preach over at the county seat, but that dreaming got cut short right quick! Typical bulls, have to wait till Sunday morning to destroy the place. Well, I got on my $12 cell phone and called in for help and was trying to decide what to do and all I could think of was to haul em across the county road to a large pen we have over there that wasn’t being used at the moment. Help came a while later and then the bull fighting began, human verses bulls but somehow the humans won, with the help of a skidsteer loader if I might add. One thing about bulls, every time you move em to a new pen, or even a cattle trailer for that matter, they just gotta bore down and fight each other. That old rusty cattle trailer was really bouncing with them in there, but we got em hauled over to the other pens after about two hours of muddy work. By those pens there was still snow drifts so we even had to put chains on the tires of the four wheel drive Chevy flatbed in order to haul them over to it. More work!

But today, Monday, all was peaceful out there and they were calmed down and in allot less mud than they were before. I was calmed down a whole lot too. Its sometimes strange after a day like Sunday to have to wash up later and go preach to folks when I person was so strung up with the wild day just hours before. But its reality. In fact last night I just talked my sermon just like if I was talking to someone over the corral fence. And it reminded me, that’s the way I should always do it. Simple, personal, and from the heart with no fake in it. That’s how Jesus did it, simple, and so folks could understand it.