If I Was A Blog Post

If I was a blog post, I would be about… huh… drawing a blank. I’m sure there’s a blog post lurking around here somewhere. Maybe I should check under the couch. Perhaps it dropped back behind the way the throw pillows do. Hm, guess not. Maybe I’m just unmotivated. I can’t really claim to have been horribly busy. There have been things to do, for sure, but it’s not been complete craziness.

I could lay some of the blame on spring fever. The weather has been, if not outright lovely, at least plenty nice enough to make outside quite attractive. Spring isn’t my favorite season – that place of honor is held by fall – but there are things about spring I just love, like the incredible range of green shades, the flowers, and how the land wakes up. Early spring is a stormy curmudgeon who has not yet had enough coffee and grumbles about the light.

But once in bloom? Spring makes me wonder if perhaps, after all, the earth is a morning person. It’s (mostly) warmer. The birds seem to share in the joy and are all a twitter-pated. There are wild turkeys out in the woods, and the toms are out there a-gobbling. They have a funny cry. I suppose it’d be scary in the dark if it was unfamiliar. The lambs are in their juvenile delinquent stage. They’re about half sized, still rounded with baby fat, and quite full of themselves. Kimberly has rediscovered her swing. She dons her bike helmet and carefully walks out to the swing. While she’s out there, the hills are alive with the sound of music. If she faces downhill and away from the tree, there’s a bit of an echo from the hills just across the valley. She loves to go out there and sing and sing and sing.

I love being out in all of this, of being a part of this world. It sweeps me away. One day last week, I went out just to transplant a few flowers from their unwanted, volunteer location to the new and highly desirable development near the chicken pen. As I was moving them, I realized that I could use the extra dirt in the beds I’d started for ferns. I just needed a few more rocks! While I was hauling more rocks, I found a hole, which explained how that one hen keeps getting out. I filled the hole and hauled more rocks and talked to Mom, who mentioned the mint waste, and one thing led to another and another… Next thing I knew, I’d been out there about three times as long as I’d planned, and it was well past lunch time!

Spring fever, I suppose. My mind’s outside wandering. I’m sure it will come back eventually. It might even bring a blog post back with it!

Many Forms

Blue skies, gentle breezes, green pasture, sunlight splashing off white backs onto grey coats as the flock of mommas with their little lambs went scudding across the grass together, all in a wild, ungainly rush of floppy wool – priceless!

Beauty comes in so many forms.

The Lamb Show

My glasses are all gooky. I didn’t realize it until I sat down to type this up, and the screen helpfully pointed out that there are plenty of smears on my glasses. It’s to be expected, I suppose. I hauled my camera out for the Marion County Lamb and Wool Show today. The pressure of the eyepiece up against my eyeglasses always causes dirty glasses. I also seem to have a bit of poison oak rash on my hand. Rotten lambs!

Still, all the mild complaints aside, it was a lovely day for the show. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The weather flipped  between overcast and sunny, which meant it never got too hot or too cold for too long. It sprinkled just enough rain to help keep the dust down that the sheep would normally kick up. The shows were good practice for the girls and the lambs before the county fair. The lamb kebabs were delicious! The border collies, tongues hanging out, looked as though they were grinning at the sheep they were herding. The annual parade abounded with candy for the kids and gratitude for the preservation of the town’s residents during the winter flooding. The playground, particularly at lunch time, was fully of children happily playing together. It was a lovely day.

I’ll get back to Isaiah 53 and brokenness soon. 🙂

The Lamb of God

Currently, we have four lambs running about here. Two of the ewes dropped sets of twins in the last couple of days, and there are two ewes to go. Carey and I took advantage of a sunny patch this afternoon to take a look at them. One of those ewes doesn’t look like she’s pregnant, but it would be her first. Maybe she’s psyching us out. The lambs are, of course, adorable, and their mothers aren’t too bad, either.

The current set sure is more friendly than the set we had at first. Jemima, Goldie, and Cider were old Shropshire ewes used to living pretty much on their own out in the field. They didn’t much like having people around, and they especially didn’t like being handled. Working with them… well, it was certainly made for several memorable experiences, shall we say? It made me much better able to understand that “all we like sheep have gone astray.” I don’t do much with the current set, who would be Lily, Cutie Pie, She-Hulk, and Tiger Lily, but I don’t have to see that they are much more friendly. They don’t back off, stamp a foot, snort, roll their eyes, and defiantly pee when people approach. Instead, I heard much excitement in the baas greeting me. The pigs… er, sheep were hoping for grain. The really hilarious thing is I discovered that Cutie Pie had her own supply in her pen, but she didn’t want it. She expected me to stand there and feed her by hand. I came back with sheep slobber all over one hand.

As I said, the lambs are adorable. They always are. Lambs as a type are my favorite baby. I do apologize to my friends who have had babies – your babies as individuals are all adorable, too. It’s just that lambs in a group are my favorite. They’re long legged, tail waggers full of curiosity and very little fear who play and play and play and eat and sleep and play. They bounce. They spring. They bound. They seem to defy the laws of physics in their action sometimes. They slip through the cracks of the fence to merrily run amok in the yard while their mothers stand anxiously at the fence calling for their wayward offspring. They’re full of (mostly harmless) mischief. They parade about pretending to be big, fierce sheep (mostly an oxymoron) and then freak over a leaf skittering through the middle of their small flock. They make me laugh. I can watch the silly hooligans for hours.

More than one time this afternoon, I smiled thinking about the antics this crop of lambs will probably pull in the next couple of months as they explore. Lambs are great.

And then I got to thinking that Christ is the Lamb of God. He is identified as the Lamb of God by John the Baptist in John 1:29. The book of Revelations also favors that name. Jesus is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” When I’ve thought of Jesus as the Lamb of God, I realized today, it’s always been tinged with the color of sacrifice. It’s been white bleeding red running black. Lambs, perfect ones, in the Old Testament were used as sacrifices. They had to be without blemish, without defect, and their deaths were an important part of many of the Temple feasts and ceremonies. I’m sure there is a load of symbolism in it that I don’t fully understand, and I’m not going to try to this day. What I do understand is that we all fall short of the glory of God, and that Christ’s sacrifice somehow took away the sins of the world and made relationship with God possible. That’s a sobering, disarming, heavy with holiness, weeping with joy kind of understanding. I am saved. I’m so grateful for my salvation.

But I wonder. I wonder. Don’t you? Is it only in the sacrifice – in death, in life offered for others – in which Christ is identified with lambs, or does the infectious joy and the delight with which I smile to see lambs living also mark Christ’s living?