Should have brought sugar along...

I'm sorry to tell about this, Colin. But the people, they have to know.

Behind my Grandmommy's old house in Alabama is a large field with a creek in some woods. The neighbor owns this land and raises horses in it. My cousin Helen loves horses and many a time I saw how the horses just came to her and she would talk to them and pet them, leaving me with the impression that horses are nice.

Not all of them are.

One day Colin and I leave the house bound for the creek. We take turns lifting the bottom string of barbed wire so that the other can crawl through and once we are over we notice a horse that I have never seen before.

When I was 8 I went with a group horse back riding and my horse suddenly decided to take a completely different route than my peers and I had cried because I was afraid that it would take me somewhere and I would never get back. So as we approached this horse in the back of my mind I knew that horses could be unpredictable, but I had seen Helen with these horses before so I knew that it would be okay.

Ten feet before we reached the horse, it suddenly reared on it's hind legs and started to neigh. Mouth open and eyes bulging I remembered hearing that horses could sense fear so I turned to tell Colin that we should not run, but walk away thus showing this horse that we had no fear. But as I turned to look at Colin I just kept turning and turning until I was watching my cousin with his back to me bolting it back to the barbed wire fence.

I wasn't going to be the last one there.

There is a Star Trek episode where the ship is locking up because of a leak on one of the decks and as the bay doors are slamming shut, one of the main characters dives just under it and rolls to safety. When I watched that I thought, "Wow, there is no way they did it that perfectly. They would need to crawl a little at least." I was wrong. I rolled under that bad boy as beautifully as I had seen on TV.

That demon horse came right up to the fence and stared us down as we stood, feeling weak and a bit silly, a safe 5 feet away.

Hope is a knowledge that something that we don't have yet will be enough. When we hope, it is not something that we already have, but a belief in things that will be. My hope is in Jesus, that one day I will be done running away from my fears and pains and will finally be safe.