A Heavy Tail
Reflective Reading: Hebrews 12
I waited too long! It was a great illustration while it lasted, but it came with a price: innocent life, lost.
While raising sheep, the one task I disliked most was cutting the tails off lambs. But this allowed the lamb to be free of this meaningless attachment. Meaningless? Actually, I didn’t know why I was cutting off their tails! So one day I decided to leave the tail on one of the lambs and observe her attached tail. Certainly, if God wanted the tail off, He wouldn't have created it in the first place!
I even began to research the history of sheep tails and found that sheep store much of their fat in their tail. During famine or weeks or even months of parched grasslands, the survival of the sheep is dependent upon the fat stored in their tails. I was on to something!
But as time passed, what I observed in my little lamb alarmed me. Her tail began growing larger and larger—not in fat, but in burrs and thistles. Within eight weeks, the tail was about three inches in diameter. To make matters worse, her excrement began attaching to the tail, which brought flies. At twelve weeks, the tail was five inches in diameter. She was literally dragging her tail around. It was such a pitiful sight I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to cut the tail.
When I went to the barn the next morning to put an end to this ridiculous experiment, I found her lying in the feed trough—dead. I, the shepherd, the cause. The memory of this scene still haunts me.
In Hebrews 12, the writer admonishes us to,
“lay aside every weight and the sin which does so easily entangle us…”
Though it is true that mountain sheep do not need to have their tails removed because of environmental differences, domestic sheep do. The practice of cutting the lamb’s tail may have been unpleasant, but it was crucial.
Is there something that needs to be removed from your life? May we ask God for wisdom to know the “things” that can weigh us down, entangle us, and eventually keep us from running the race that is set before us.
Sincerely,
Mark Hamby
M.S., M. Div., Th. M., D. Min.
Book Recommendations:
Little Lamb book/audiobook (Ages 9+)
Peep Behind the Scenes book/audio drama (Ages 9+)
Idols of the Heart (Ages 12+)
