Horse Training and Christian Foundations

When working toward growth in any arena, there is always a tendency to try to shortcut the process. We want to be able to have the outcome but not put in the time, energy, and sometimes suffering it takes to grow up in wisdom and maturity.

When training horses I have found, often you get down the trail a ways and find that the foundation that was originally laid breaks down when you really begin to ask a horse to do something that they don’t naturally like to do. I have found in my own life this is also true. If the foundational pieces have not been laid well, we will always have issues down the road.

When training a horse we start with simple expectations that don’t require much accept a willingness to stand still or to move their feet in a particular way. These pieces of the training process often times seem as though they aren’t that big of a deal and so if the horse seems to get it a person moves on to the stuff they really want their horse to be able to do. The problem is these seemingly minor issues will show up magnified later.

Case in point! You want your horse to stand still when you are in the saddle. So you work on things from the ground and he stands relatively well so you move on. You get on your horse and all he wants to do is walk around, follow the other horses, and be otherwise fidgety. You didn’t take the time to move him around the arena under saddle until he was tired enough to want to stop and stand and then keep him moving for a while longer, several times. So now though you have an ok horse you don’t have a truly quiet horse.

We are much the same. We study something out in the word and feel like we have an ok grasp of it and so we move on to read something else having not walked out the particular thing we were learning about in our daily walk (Hebrews 5:14)  says "by reason of use have exercised their senses". This becomes problematic as we get farther down the road. When, we bump into something more difficult to walk out in our life and we haven’t practiced it consistently. It hasn’t gotten to the automatic stage in our daily walk and we stumble in an area we thought we had control of or felt we had gained maturity.

We need to get excited about chewing on the word. Truly tasting the truth of who God is and what He has called us to. We all need to build solid foundations in the basic biblical truths of life. If we do they will overtime not only be foundations, but they will become buildings that will protect us and provide shelter for those around us.