I Trust A Hunch About A Heifer

He did it twice before breakfast and did not notice either time.

The first was the weather. He looked at a sky that any forecast would have called fine, and moved a job to the morning, and could not have told you why. He has been doing that for forty-two years and he is right often enough that his son has stopped arguing.

The second was a heifer in the far pen. He walked past, and something in the way she was standing did not sit right, and he did not think she is unwell, he did not think anything in words at all. He just came back forty minutes later, and he was right, and it was caught early because of it.

That is a Tuesday. That is not a remarkable Tuesday. That is what the job is.

And at about half past eleven on the same morning he had a thought about a man he knows.

Same shape. No words attached. Just something not sitting right about how he had been at the sale last week.

And he did nothing.

Not because he was busy. He has been chewing on this since and he has been honest with himself, which he mostly is, and the truth is that he did nothing because the moment it was about a person he stopped trusting it.

He trusts it about a sky. He trusts it about a cow. He would move a whole day's work on it and has, many times.

He will not ring a man on it.

And what he cannot work out, standing at the gate in the afternoon with the light going, is where that rule came from, because he did not make it and he has never once said it out loud, and it is as solid as anything in him.

And that is you at your own gate, or you would have gone in for your tea by now.

You already know how this works

Let me not argue you into anything, because you are not a man who is argued into things. Let me just point at what you already do.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.John 10:27

Hear. Follow. Two ordinary verbs, and He puts them in the present tense as a plain description of what His sheep are like.

Notice He does not say: my sheep receive verified messages. He does not say my sheep are certain. Hearing and following, in that verse, are not achievements. They are what a sheep does, in the way that a sheep does not have to be persuaded to know its own shepherd's voice out of four voices in a yard.

You already hear and you already follow, and you have been doing it since about half past six this morning. It is written that His sheep hear His voice and follow Him (John 10:27), and hearing there is a description rather than a qualification. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to learn a skill you do not have.

Now the rule you did not make, and where it came from.

I think you know, actually. Somewhere along the line you picked up the idea that hunches about weather and stock are experience, and hunches about people are a claim about God, and a claim about God is a serious thing that ought to be left to people who talk more than you do.

And half of that is right. A claim about God is serious.

But look at what you were actually going to do with the thought about that man.

Ring him.

That is not a claim. Nobody is going to be told anything about their life. You are not going to say the word God to him. You are going to ring somebody and ask him how the sale went, and if the whole thing was your own head, then a man gets a phone call from a neighbor and that is the entire consequence.

You are able to act on it without claiming anything at all, and the risk in ringing a man is nothing. It is written that we are to encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thessalonians 5:11), and no announcement is required anywhere in that. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to become somebody who says things in front of a room.

And I want to say one more thing, because I think it has been sitting under this since the morning.

You are not being asked to be certain, and you have never once been certain about the sky. It is written that all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Romans 8:14), and led is a word about being taken somewhere and not a word about knowing the route. The Holy Spirit has been leading a man who does not need certainty to move for forty-two years, in every part of his life except one.