Bucky Ate the Feed Bag I Was Saving

I had the winter worked out to the week. I want that on the record before anybody starts enjoying this.

There were nine sacks of the ordinary feed and four sacks of the good feed, and the good feed was for February, because February is when a cow who has been standing in mud since November starts to look at you a certain way. Nine sacks of ordinary, then four of good, and out the other side into grass. I had written it on the inside of the feed store door in pencil. It was a good system and it had worked for eleven years.

Bucky opened the feed store door in the third week of November. He does this by leaning on it in a way that I have watched him do and still cannot reproduce, and he went through two of the four good sacks in one night, mostly by tearing them open and standing in them.

I did not holler the boy's name that morning because the boy was already there. He had heard the door. He was sitting on an upturned bucket watching a goat stand in a burst sack of feed like a man watching the sea, and when I came in he said, without turning round, that Bucky had picked the best one.

So we fed the good feed out early, because feed that has been stood in does not keep, and the cows got it through the last week of November and the first two weeks of December.

And then it rained for thirty one days.

Not hard. Just constantly, the kind that does not stop and does not flood, and the top field went to soup and everything came inside three weeks earlier than usual, and those cows went into that long wet winter carrying the condition off the good feed that they were not supposed to have had until February.

By February they were fine. By February they were better than fine. And I have never got that eleven year system back and I have not especially tried.

The proverb divides the job in half

There is a short verse that gets quoted as a warning and is actually a division of labor.

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps. (Proverbs 16:9)

Notice that the first half is not criticized. The man devising his way is not being told off for devising. Planning is a good and ordinary human thing and the proverb lets it stand.

What it does is add a second sentence. The plan is the man's job. The steps are God's, and those are two different jobs held by two different parties, and only one of them can see the weather.

You are not carrying both halves of that verse, and you never were. Proverbs 16:9 hands the steps to the Lord in the same breath that it lets a man keep his plan, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a good mood who makes that read as relief.

Eleven years of pencil on the inside of a door is devising. That is the half I get. What I do not get, and never did, is thirty one days of rain in December.

You have never once been the one holding the outcome, however hard you were gripping it. The written word puts the directing of steps somewhere else entirely, and His Spirit is what turns that from a fact on a page into a night's sleep.

The man who went out to find donkeys

There is a whole chapter of the Bible that begins with a young man looking for livestock and ends with him being anointed king, and nobody in the chapter is aware that this is happening.

Saul's father loses some donkeys. Saul is sent out with a servant to find them. They walk through three named regions and do not find them, which is a detail the text bothers to record, and at the point of giving up the servant mentions that there is a man of God in the town who might know something.

And Saul said to his servant, But, behold, if we go, what shall we bring the man? for the bread is spent in our vessels. (1 Samuel 9:7)

That is the level this is operating at. He is worried about not having a gift to bring. Two verses later he meets Samuel, who has been told by God the day before that this man is coming and what he is for.

The donkeys, incidentally, had already been found. Samuel tells him so almost in passing, like a man clearing something small off a table.

You are being walked somewhere by a route you would not have picked and could not have drawn. 1 Samuel 9 tells the whole thing from the inside of a man who thinks he is on an errand, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that read as care rather than as manipulation.

You have not lost the day by losing the plan for it. That is what the chapter quietly does with three regions of fruitless walking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a story about somebody else into a person's own week.