Oxen, Anyone?

             Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty, but from the strength of an ox come abundant harvests. (Proverbs 14:4)

Ah, Biblical justification for clutter! Where there is no clutter, the house is clean and tidy, but from the clutter comes craft products! Of course, if the oxen are left in the stable, their strength is doing nothing toward the abundant harvest except maybe providing fertilizer. In the same way, clutter that isn’t used is just taking up space, unless it’s providing a home for something you don’t want in  your house.

This is also true of life. We prefer our lives to be under control and easy. The idea of something bigger and stronger than we are wandering in and making itself at home in the most inconvenient way possible isn’t fun. Problems the size of a mosquito bother us, how much more problems the size of oxen settling in our bed or on our sofas?

At the moment, I’d say I don’t have any oxen in my life. Fortunately, I don’t think I have any lions, tigers, or bears. But I probably have a goat. It’s not one of the cute fainting kinds or a kid, it’s the sort that likes to headbutt, often from ambush. And then there’s the dog, who takes up her half of the bed in the middle. I can’t tell you how many mosquitoes and houseflies buzz around my life. The point is that these problems, no matter cutely we describe them in metaphor, interfere with our lives, but they also produce harvests of character.

Here's the challenge we face: learning how to use the metaphorical oxen, goats, dogs, mosquitoes, and flies in a way that makes the harvest more abundant and making up our minds to tolerate their inconvenience in return for their help. Keep in mind that people and God are both counted among the metaphorical oxen that populate the barnyards called “life.”