Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Good morning K2! Welcome, we want to just greet you this morning and move into our discussion
this morning. We're continuing "The Opposite Way" series, and my name is Josh Gutzwiller,
I'm the high school director here at K2 The Church, I'm the one that's hanging out with
your teenagers and having a great time with them.
So this morning we're going to be talking about the verse, "Blessed are the meek, for
they will inherit the earth." And the Beatitudes is a bunch of teachings that Jesus gave and
this is one of them, and we want to just kind of dive into that today, soak it in and try
and get to the meaning and the root meaning and what it means to be meek.
So, what does that have to do with where I'm at today? As you can see, I am in the middle
of nowhere Utah, there is nothing around for miles, I'm not quite sure I know how to get
out of here - we'll figure that out - but, as you can see behind me, there's this herd
of horses, and these aren't ranch horses, they don't belong to anyone, these are wild
horses, as wild as it gets, and so as we prep to go into the teaching today, we want you
to think about what does it mean just to be wild, I mean, naturally and at the core, wild,
like a wild animal. Have you ever thought about what that's like? Maybe you've been
to Africa and seen the safari, but right here in Utah, we've got these wild horses. So today,
as we talk about what it means to be meek, think about that, dwell on that a little bit
and the other verse that we're going to spend some time on is going to be James 3:3, and
James 3:3 says, "If we put bits into horses' mouths, not only do we control their mouths,
but we control their whole bodies..."
I'm going to leave you with that and we're going to talk to our friend Cliff about that
some more, but, just take a second and think about just, these are wild animals out here
and what that really means. So, once again, good morning and welcome.
Well my name is Cliff Tipton, you're here at my ranch in Erda, Utah. This where we bring
horses that the BLM bring fresh off the range. They'll bring us probably thirty head of horses
a year, we'll bring them in and we'll teach people actually how to work with these horses.
To take them from a never been touched state ever, to first touches, first halterings,
leading, picking up feet, grooming and just getting the horses ready to go for an adoption.
These animals are very, very powerful, but they can be gentle giants at the same time.
This horse wants to run from me because he's scared and he doesn't know what I'm going
to do to him. His communication with the human up to this point has been very bad. He's been
gathered up by using the most gentle means in the world, by helicopters running them
into pens, then they're loaded onto trucks, taken up to a facility, where they're gone
in and done what they call documented or processed. So, therefore their first contact with man
has been pretty ugly. So here, in this pen, we want to get this horse to be trusting,
and willing to be with us. Right now all he's doing is he's just trying to avoid me getting
close to him. So I'm just going to stand way out here and I'll put my contact on him. This
is basically just like my hand touching him from a safe distance. This allows me to put
contact on him, and he can't avoid it. I can touch him anywhere I want, and as much as
he moves, he'll find out that he can't avoid me touching him. I'm going to work with this pole until I can touch this
horse all over his body, and get his feet to slow down just a little bit. As long as
his feet are moving, he's not really thinking too much. Once I can kind of start coming
in and touching this horse with this pole, I'm going to rub him. He's gonna find out
that this feels really good, and it's a comfortable thing to him, so I can get caught up in his
mane, he gets to find out that I can start to touch him all over, and I'm not such a
threat. I'm not gonna, I'm not here to pick on him, I'm not gonna beat on him, I'm not
gonna hurt him. And then as I work with this pole, I start to shorten the distance on my
pole, so that I start getting closer. I'm gonna start making offers to him, for him
to come up and touch me.
Now that I've got ahold of his halter, all I'm going to do is put a little bit of light
light pressure on this lead rope, and I'm going to ask him to come with me. You start
building on that until the point you can actually lead him around the whole pen. So now I can
actually start stepping in here and putting a little bit more contact on him. There, he's
just saying "Hey, that's ok, that wasn't bad, you smelled kinda funny."
Everytime I touch a horse for the first time, I get really excited. I almost get a little,
kinda, what you might say, "mushy", because it's just such a thrill, it's a thrill that
you can't describe, to anybody, because it's just every horse is different, and it's just
a lot of fun.