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TITLE: Trust | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lamar Taylor
11/16/14
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Trust

One of my favorite Scripture passages is Proverbs 3:5, 6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” (NIV).

The importance of these verses was very dramatically illustrated for me during a hunting trip some years back. My pastor, Ben* and I had ridden horse-back into our hunting area in the early morning dark, enduring icy pellets of frozen rain and a cold wind. We were hunting mule deer in the beautiful mountains of northern Montana, just south of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

Late in the afternoon, we shot two bucks. The youngest horse had never packed out game, but we decided to use him to pack out one of the deer. He wasn’t too sure about having a dead animal on his back, but stood still while we tied the deer on his back. Ben led him and I rode the other horse since I was the “old guy” (I was 58 at the time!). We kept a sharp eye on the pack horse as we went down the mountain to our vehicle, which took a couple of hours.

By the time we rode back in for the second deer, it was starting to get very dark. For some reason I can’t remember, we decided to tie a rope around the antlers of the second deer and drag it out. Within a short time, it was pitch dark, with no moon to light our way. Ben took the lead with the young horse dragging the deer. Not long after we started down the mountain, my horse began acting up, and I suddenly found myself flat on my back on the ground. Ben said my horse, apparently spooked by the dragging deer, just began to spin around, throwing me off. In the melee, his horse was also spooked and ran away, dragging the dead deer behind it

Because I was hurting, I decided to walk for awhile. We could hear the other horse out in the surrounding trees, but couldn’t see him. After a while, we located it and Ben rounded him up. He stowed the deer in the fork of a tree and would come back the next morning to retrieve it. We mounted up and began the long ride back to the vehicle.

Because it was so dark, we couldn’t see the trail, so we had to trust the horses to find their way. The darkness was so deep that if I had not been able to feel the horse moving under me, I would have sworn that sometimes we were standing still. Once in a while, I would look to either side, barely able to discern that we were riding past trees. I wasn’t scared. We knew it was best to let the horses have their heads. Never-the-less, it was a weird feeling. If we had tried to direct the horses ourselves, we might have gotten lost or injured or ended up going in circles.

The horses delivered us safely to our vehicle, and we slept in our own beds that night instead of out under the cold, star-lit sky.

Sometimes life circumstances are so dark, we can’t see our way out of them. We try to find our own way, try to solve the problems with our own human intellect or power, but all we do is become more lost or keep going in circles. And we can’t even tell if we’re moving.

God says, “Trust Me to take care of you in every situation and to lead you to where I’m asking you to go. Don’t trust in your own resources. Trust in Me. Abandon yourself to Me.”

The horse-back ride in the dark was a good lesson for me, a great illustration of how we can trust God in every situation.

By the way, Ben did go back the next day and retrieve the other deer. We had our venison for the winter.

*Not his real name

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