Many years ago as a teen I worked on a dairy farm, west of the town of Payson. I did odd jobs around the farm for one dollar an hour. I fed the heifers, cleaned up their corrals while they were being milked, or anything else the farm boss wanted me to. One thing I soon learned is that dairy cows, or heifers, are very stubborn. They would get their heads stuck in the tightest places trying to scrape for that last piece of silage corn. It was such a hassle trying to get them free without getting hurt. They would get tangled up in barb-wire fence, fall on their backs in irrigation ditches, and break through fences to go running through the farm while we all chased the dumb things from farm to farm. The farm boss, who happened to also be my bishop, would refer to the stubborn cows as "back-sliding heifers." The heifers that caused the most problem had to be put into the wide open field where the sheep grazed. This was not what my bishop wanted to do, the heifers often did not hear his voice when it came time to milk. But he did it in order to save the lives of the stubborn heifers. The most stubborn heifers had to be yoked around the neck and anchored to a stationary place. This caused great distress on both the heifer and my bishop, for it would often scare the heifer for life.
In Hosea 4:16, God's description of some of His ancient children, and some of His current children is much like the those stubborn heifers. "For Israel slideth back as a back-sliding heifer: now the Lord will feed them as a lamb in a large place."
In every generation, God has had problems with His stubborn heifers. And like my bishop’s back-sliding heifers, stubbornness brings on a lot of unnecessary hardships. We are often stubborn and get loose of our protective corrals, requiring that the Lord chasten us until we repent and come back to His protection. I wonder if, when our Heavenly Father looks at us sliding back, He sometimes says, "My stubborn one, you keep getting into situations where you need my help. Now I must feed you in the large field with the sheep, and hope you hear my voice when I call."
A dairy farmer sometimes has to put cumbersome yokes and sometimes painful constraints on a stubborn one. And that may explain why life can be so difficult for us. Yet it is us that place those yokes on ourselves. It's unnecessary grief . . . grief because we simply will not do it God's way. We insist on our way . . . our outcome . . . our timetable. In certain areas of our life, we just have our mind made up of how it's going to be - and we’re determined that not even God is going to make us change or move.
It doesn't matter how much we dress up our stubbornness, it's still our way versus God's way. And you can't possibly win on that one.
But aren't we tired of the pain the yoke puts on us? God brings difficulties into our life, not to hurt us, but to get us to go where we would never otherwise go . . . to get us to stop what we otherwise would not stop . . . to change what we otherwise would never consider changing. Why? So we will finally line up with God's will for us. So we can be all we were born to be, and be corralled with those heifers that follow the voice of their leader, rather than feeding so far away that we cannot hear the masters voice.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, as Christ faced the awesome prospect of carrying the weight of the world's sin, He prayed some of the most powerful words in the world, " not my will, but Yours be done." The Lord has been waiting a long time to hear those words from us, to fully say that we trust in him as our Shepherd.
We have all carried enough burdens, gotten enough scars, run into enough fences, been lost in open fields far from the Lord’s call. It's time to surrender that stubborn heart and let God do it His way. We were created for a Shepherd--and the Lord can't shepherd a stubborn heifer.