For two blissful minutes, my mind was free. Not stressing about where to position the reins, which direction to look, whether I held tension in my body, or if I would make a mistake and look foolish. Albeit short-lived, I understood what all the horse hype was about, and I wanted more.
Veteran horsemen refer to the bond between horse and human. Some even say they feel one with the horse. This was a foreign concept to me, having never interacted with horses, but one I wanted to understand. So, when I began mentoring at a youth ranch, I approached each horse session thinking, “Today I’ll feel a connection to these horses.”
Except I didn’t.
Until I received the gift of a private riding lesson on a well-trained horse. “Horses don’t know chaos,” the trainer said. “We bring it to them.”
I brought chaos into the arena by striving for a union that I couldn’t force, not understanding that if I cleared my mind of everything and just focused on the horse, we’d naturally move as one.
And during that moment of freedom on the horse’s back, the Lord said, “Amy, this is abiding.”
“Abide in Me, and I in you.” John 15:4a (NASB)
Jesus was answering my prayer: “How? How do I abide in You without interruption?”
I have much to learn about abiding; Jesus is teaching me in His gracious way—little by little and step by step.
My next few blog posts (maybe more), will focus on the Holy Spirit’s instruction in my life. Any quotations I reference apart from the Bible will be from Andrew Murray’s book, Abide in Christ: A 31-Day Devotional for Fellowship with Jesus. I highly recommend this book if you are also seeking to abide in Christ more fully.
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