After church and a quick lunch, we drove to Hamilton with the horsetrailer yesterday. It was time to wrangle our six adult sheep. Wrangling includes positioning the horsetrailer next to my parents' pasture fence, setting up some horsepanels on both sides of the trailer to make a broad "run" into the open trailer filled with some scrumptious alfalfa hay, then chasing the sheep around the pasture a bit until they follow our directions out of sheer exhaustion. Thirty minutes was all the wrangling took this year as the sheep had grown lazy and tired out quickly. We also had kept the lambs separated the last couple of months...allowing the ewes some down time and then the chance to breed again with the ram. We wrangled the lambs into our trailer this morning to take them to the co-op. truck pick-up point. There they were weighed in, (an average 93 pounds each), and loaded into the truck for the drive to market. Another lambing season come full circle.
The willfulness of each sheep and lamb is evident during wrangling. Yet, so is the flock instinct. It takes only one reluctant sheep/ lamb to keep the others from entering the chute/run and therefore the trailer. It also takes only one leading sheep/lamb to start the flock back in the right direction. Yeshua so frequently compared humans to sheep. Here is another similarity. I can influence others toward His way or my own. Without thinking the rest tend to follow. I may be one of those unthinking followers much of the time, too. Oh, I'm feeling so sheepish again.
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1 comment:
This was a great illustration. Excellent title, too! Great to see you yesterday. Happy belated birthday. You know, you don't look a day over eighteen!
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