So I have this horse. She doesn’t actually belong to me, but I see her all the time, and I'm pretty sure I love her more than anyone else, and I hope someday she gets to be mine.
Working with a horse has been a frustrating, eye-opening, and remarkably rewarding experience. Horses are powerful. They can break your bones or kill you if you're flippant or foolish around them. And yet if you know how to ask, they will do anything for you. They will trust you, and the trust of a horse is no after thought. It is a trust that says, I know I will not die as long as you’re here.
Training a horse especially when you've never trained one before, is challenging for a very specific reason. The horse can't speak. She can't understand English. And I can't speak horse. And yet, horses can be taught to do the most incredible things. Why? Because horses can learn from non verbals. In fact, that's the only way to teach them. And they learn surprisingly fast. They learn so fast, that you better know what you're doing before you ask them to do it or you could end up teaching something you have to un-teach and fix at a later date. Like, next week when you realize you didn’t mean what you taught. Or is it that you didn’t teach what you meant?
Working with a horse has taught me a lot about action. I can stand in the middle of the round pen and look at my horse and say, "Okay, it's time to lunge,” (which means exercising on a lead rope in a circle around the trainer) and she'll just stand there and look at me. But if I step to the right so I'm in line with her hip and simultaneously move my left hand, with the lead rope in it, out and point to the left, she'll instinctively start walking. I don't have to say a word. I may train her to understand the words "walk," "trot," "run," but she will only understand those words because they were connected to non verbals as she trained.
Working with my horse has taught me that what I do matters a lot more than what I say and what I say MUST be connected to what I do, and I don't think this is any different than with people. The difference is, people can understand what I say and if I say something that is disconnected from what I am doing, they can judge me for it.
In a place and time where people throw words around like healing balm and gyuto knives all at once, perhaps we would do well to hold our tongue and consider a different way of understanding one another. I think it would do all church leaders some good to connect with someone who truly understands the equine species and learn a little of what it means to work with a horse. Who knows? It just might do wonders for the church. Maybe even miracles.
Horses are incredibly forgiving. They fill in places we're not capable of filling ourselves.
--Buck Brannaman
