In The Beginning...

My first day of work as Western Frontiers Mission Adventure Staff is drawing to a close. My day started around what I thought was 8:00 but actually was about 7:30. I woke up to clumping on the porch that continued on and off for several minutes. I walked out my front door to find horses grazing a few feet away. There are a lot of cactuses in their pasture so they were turned lose. Thus began my day.


My first chore of the day was taking down bailing twine that had been used to rope off a parking area for the Rodeo Bible Camp that took place last week. When that was finished I did some shifting and organizing in storage rooms and cleaned up a bit from the bible camp. The whole time i was working our overly friendly mama goat and her two kids hung around and got in the way. They even wondered into the DTS trailer a couple of times and had to be kicked out. Then I helped put together packets for mission adventures and cleaned up a room that we are going to make into a prayer room. Somewhere in there my roommate, Sarah, and I put some panels away that were in the livestock area. We left the gate opened not realizing that the area we were in opened all the way back into the cattle pasture. The panels were in a small fenced area and apparently the horses thought we were going to give them something special because they followed us. About ten horses in a small fenced area while we are trying to move big panels. We thought chasing them out was a good idea. We did not know they would end up with the cattle. When we finished moving the panels we then chased the horses, but they really liked the pasture area even though it did not have a single blade of grass in it. Eventually we gave up and penned the horses in.

The sad news for the day is that yesterday the new horses turned up lame. Thankfully there was an agreement that if they were not sound they could be returned by Monday. So Dave took them back this morning. However when they ran them at the sales place the one showed no sign of lameness so they refused to take it back. The horse is very sweet but a lame horse is not helpful to the ministry here. The hope is that when it is fattened up it won’t be bad. He has been named Zacheus Jehoshaphat. You are supposed to say it slow so it comes out kind of like… Your-horse-is-fat. I guess the name is to encourage him to put on some weight. He looks like a skeleton right now