An Ox in the Ditch

By: Chris Johnson

And he said to them, ‘Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?’ – Luke 14:5

Seldom in modern times has Jesus’ example of work permissible on the Sabbath been more literally carried out than around here this past Sunday.

There were no wells, but there were cattle and they were in a corn field bordered by a highway on one side and a fairly busy road on another.

Let me start at the beginning.

There I was after church, sitting down with a plate of snacks in our fellowship room, two bites deep into a pumpkin bar, when my wife received the communique: our neighbors’ steers were on the loose.

The steers had been purchased to be raised and shown in next summer’s county fair. They were about 750 pounds and were dropped off the night before. In other words, they were too big to tackle and had no idea where home was – and they were loose in 18 acres of corn.

It might make me look better if I could say I threw down my plate and dashed off to help, but it would not be true. I savored the pumpkin bar (if you read this, Kaitlyn, I’d like the recipe) and the cookies, and THEN we dashed off to help. It’s a good thing though, because what we thought would take an hour, leaving us with a healthy appetite in time for lunch at my parents, stretched on well past dinner time, and I was running only on flour, sugar, and pumpkin puree.

Now, I’ve been reading Lonesome Dove, so I felt pretty well equipped for some cattle wrangling. We didn’t have horses, but we did have two Polaris Rangers and a minibike. Those didn’t do us much good though, as long as the steers were hiding in the corn. Not too long after we got there, one of the steers – clearly not understanding the stakes – let his curiosity get the best of him and trotted out onto the less busy side road, where a nice lady in a Suburban, finding herself on the set of a Western and grasping her part quickly and completely, herded the steer up the road towards us.

The steer, at this point, realized that he was taking some backwards steps in his quest for freedom, and broke off to the other side of the street into another cornfield, this one harvested, and began to pound sand.

The engines of our modern mounts roared to life and we took off after it. We quickly overtook and turned the dogie pushing him back towards the pasture. I wish you could have seen it, it was like a Marlboro poster if you took out the horses and replaced them with side-by-sides and a minibike. Wheels were spinning, hooves were pounding, dust was flying, things were looking good until the steer jumped a ditch that we were not equipped to cross and bounded right back into the corn.

That was all the excitement for a while; the next few hours were spent poking through the corn with our neighbors, not just the owners of the wayward cattle, but other great neighbors who stopped to help. Every once in a while, someone would catch site of a steer in a row of corn and we’d follow it around, calling each other, trying not to lose sight of it, trying not to spook it, and trying to get everyone in one place where we could herd it out of the corn and drive it towards its home. People don’t know this, but cattle in corn essentially become ninjas. You can’t hear them, you can’t see them unless you’re on top of them, and once you lose sight of them, they’re gone. They can disappear so fast, you’d swear they had magical powers.

Eventually, the combine arrived to start to remove this advantage, but combines only go a couple of miles an hour, and doing the whole field would take all day.

However, after a few hours of tracking these mythical beasts, we succeeded in spooking one out of the corn into an adjoining hay field and the plan came together. Some of us ran the steer out of the corn, where the Rangers were waiting. They immediately drove the steer out into the open field. One was able to stay on top of it, but had to keep stopping to try to get a rope around its head, attempts which proved unsuccessful. I sprinted across the field, hopped into the Ranger, and grabbed the rope. And we took off after it again. Who knows how long it would have taken for us to tire the thing out enough to let us jump out and get a rope on it, but thankfully, he got trapped in the branches of a fallen tree laying between two fields and the driver and I we were able to get a rope over its head and tied to something sturdy.

One down.

By this time we were, as John Wayne said, “burning daylight” – in fact, most of it had burned, and we were left doing the math on how long it had taken us to capture the first steer, subtracted from how much light we had left, and we were coming up negative.

However, now we had something we didn’t have before – reinforcements. New blood. One of them had brought his drone. He found the other steer, but unfortunately, we lost it again, and then it was too dark to see the ninja bovine.

This was the difficulty. Most of us were whooped, one of us had sliced his eyeball on a corn leaf, no one had eaten since lunch, and we didn’t see how we could use the plan that caught the first steer now that it was dark. But, we couldn’t give up the search, either. This field bordered the main road, and one of these animals had already shown he didn’t have the sense to be afraid of cars. We had to catch this thing before he meandered onto the highway and got someone hurt.

We decided to get some pizza and get back to it, and now we got more reinforcements. The combine had been making passes up and down the field, wherever the steer was spotted, trying to push it out into the open. This worked a couple of times, but the steer would just turn around and pop right back in. Now two more side-by-sides and a four-wheeler came to help. So, for the next few hours, the combine would make new passes down the field, while the UTVs would run up and down the passes, shining headlights and spotlights, every now and then seeing him and jumping out to try to get a rope over its head. To folks driving by on the highway, it must have looked like quite a sight. All these lights racing up and down the field must have looked like we were hunting down a convict or something. We got close, several times, but just couldn’t snag him.

It was now 11:00 at night. We’d been at it for twelve hours, and were no closer with this steer than we were at the beginning. People had to work in the morning, we had to call off the search. So, the owners decided to patrol the edge of the field all night to ensure that this steer could not cross the street and put anybody in danger.

I went home, got out of my truck and my legs felt like jelly. I have probably never run so much in my life – according to my watch I had 27,000 steps. I got a text from my neighbor the next morning asking if I could come over in a few minutes to patrol the field while she got her girls ready for school, so I rolled out of bed to get some coffee and go, and then my phone lit up again.

We got it.

It crossed the road and walked right into the neighbor’s barn.

The workers put him in and told their boss what a nice, calm steer it was.

 Oh, you have no idea.

I hope you had more fun reading that little account than we had living it, but I didn’t just write it down for a fun read. I think there are a couple of lessons to glean. First, get to know your neighbors and be that kind of neighbor. This little, minor emergency turned into a neighborhood event as everyone who knew about it pitched in to work together and help out; it was absolutely heartwarming, Hallmark movie stuff. These are the types of relationships our country used to be built on and it needs to be that way again. Get to know each other and have each other’s back.

Second, pay close attention to the order of events: 1) we spent all our day and all our energy trying to capture this steer. 2) God makes the steer walk into a barn and let the door get shut behind him.

What a hilarious, poignant reminder of the futility of our efforts without the Lord’s blessing and how much God doesn’t need us when we do have His blessing. Obviously, chasing the steers was the right thing to do. God blessed our efforts with the first one, where if we’d just stayed at church and I’d had another pumpkin bar and gone home for lunch and if everyone else had just kept doing what they were doing, something really bad could have happened on that main road.

God doesn’t just control the heads of bulls, he also controls the politicians and judges who are bullheaded.

“The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.” Proverbs 21:1

Take heart, God can always send bulls to the barn.

 

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