Milking John with Jesus
Jesus said to them, “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.”
– From John 5
Mostly, Jesus spent his early mornings praying and the rest of his day working out the prayer. When I live that way I often experience a more seamless transition from listening to God, to listening to Margaret, to listening to counseling friends, and at nightfall, listening to God again.
It makes sense that we choose to listen more to the Holy Spirit than to each other. We talk to each other, of course, but before and after we can be silent. In our silence the Holy Spirit has room to speak. Our personal puzzles become more accessible.
I remember a moment of spiritual direction a few years ago. I sat on a dock with Nancy, my spiritual companion, gazing at the blue water. Not far away ducks floated up and down. I was struck by God’s assurance (in Isaiah 43) that he would care for me, come fire or flood. I had also heard God whisper, “But you get ahead of me, David. You work too hard alone. Please. Let me lead you, let me lead you.”
We sat quietly and listened to the water. I closed my eyes and remembered my dad’s dairy. Most nights I milked cows with my dad, and sometimes in the morning too. Halfway finished with the milking at 5:30 a.m. or so, Dad would shout loud enough to wake me, “Daaaviiiid!” I hated that.
When he bought a cow, Dad named him after the farmer’s wife. But this guy was a bachelor, so he named her John. Maybe she didn’t like that, because after we closed her head in the stanchion and began to milk her, almost every night she kicked. That cow John, she scared me.
I was 12 years old that year, I think. With John, my job was to wash her teats so the milk machine would not suck up dirt. I sat on my one-legged homemade stool and pressed my head into her hip, knowing what would happen next.
But now I was not alone. I felt Jesus sitting right up next to me, sitting on his own stool, pressing on her too. “Let me,” he said.
I looked up, and there was my dad, right beside Jesus, all of us sitting on our stools, washing John. The usual music played on in the milking barn, and after a moment, Lowell Thomas’ newscast broke in.
I told Nancy what I saw. We talked and prayed and left the water, and I knew how close God was.
Jesus did not intrude. But Jesus offered, and I said yes. I could certainly say yes more. If I do not, as Dallas Willard writes in The Divine Conspiracy, “God courteously stands aside.”
Not only was Jesus leading me, he was leading my dad too. That was a revelation. We are all in this together. Dad was just as much a child of God as I was.
For years I’ve seen a spiritual director every month. Sometimes wonderful things happen, sometimes they don’t. I plan to go again and again for the rest of my life.
William Faulkner described, in Requiem for a Nun, what often happens in God’s work with us: “Man’s imagination is so vast and limitless, (God must just) burn away the rubble, leaving only truth and dream.”
Open my mind, Lord, to your prayer in me, to your work in me. Give me words sometimes to share, and let me hold the rest close, and cherish it.
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, Chapter 6, “Investing in the Heavens: Escaping the Deceptions of Reputation and Wealth,” p. 210, 1998
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951
http://www.davesandel.net/category/lent-easter-devotions-2019/
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1779
