I actually wrote this entry about a year ago and never published it.  It’s funny how God can give something and you write it down cast it aside thinking it wasn’t that important, only to have Him bring you full circle.  This entry is a back story…..Please read it with that in mind.  I will be sharing the “Rest of the Story”  in a couple of days.

How passionate are you about your life???  What matters most to you when you wake and when you lay down at night?  What are you hoping for? What are you looking forward too?Everyone is looking… aren’t they, for the “IT” factor, for satisfaction, for love, life, liberty and happiness.  I, like most have spent my utter lifetime in search of God’s intentions for me only to wind up chasing my tail.  And then today it hit me like a lightening bolt.

I have been in the cattle trailer for two days, wet to my knees in jeans in the middle of the summer with a scrub brush in hand, my oldest son (rubber boots and all) at my side
scrubbing.  Scrubbing the entire thing from top to bottom with the feeling that the job will never end.  And whatever for you might ask ??????

Well that is the epiphany you see!!! Because we are passionate. Passionate about our industry, passionate about what we teach our children, passionate about our current lifestyle, and most important, passionate about the future.

My husband and I manage a purebred Hereford cattle operation for the family business. My handsome, stoic, hardworking, loving husband is a cattleman and a farmer.   And I am his wife.  I love being his wife. I am also a mother to four gloriously beautiful children.  In the past few weeks I have come to understand the true gift that they are and that they are only on loan for a brief time while they grow and develop into gifted adults that, I pray, will be used for great things.  Motherhood never had so much significance.  How you might ask does this connect to the scrubbing the cattle trailer?

Currently, we are tirelessly scrubbing to prepare for a trip we will take with cattle in tow to the heart of Minneapolis tomorrow.  Our family has been asked to represent our breed during a large sales meeting for a national food company.  We’ve not only been scrubbing trailers, but cattle, panels, feed bunks, everything. I am exhausted and so are my children and yet I realized as I was finishing the floor of the trailer, which has taken two days and is just about clean enough to eat off of, that we do all we do for our industry because we
believe in it .  Not just a little bit, but with every ounce of our very being.  And as my
children look at me forlorn and disappointed when I send them out on day two to
complete our tasks I find my self side by side with them wanting to teach them through this experience, the importance of commitment and belief.  That all things important require that little extra.

My daughter said to me, “Why mamma, why do we have to spend so much time?”  And I replied, “Because when these shiny clean animals walk off this shiny clean sliver trailer into their beautiful freshly mulched pen those coming to see them will know that we love our animals, that we care for them and that we BELIEVE in what we do.”  And I watched the light come on in her face. Yes, she got it!

And then I stood back and watched them play and laugh and find joy in their work, because they BELIEVE  in what they represent.  And trust me the work is hard, real hard.  But from belief in a task comes belief in oneself.  So tomorrow, when we take the honor of representing what we believe in it is my prayer that those we come in contact with will see the essence of who we are and what we love.  And that my children will understand the gift of hard work.

Proverbs 16:3  Commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established.