I wrote this back in April this year, but forgot to actually press “Publish”. I was in the midst of a storm back then, and I want to honour the tremendous ways in which God helps me through every difficulty.

I’m only about 5′ 4″ and I don’t weigh a whole lot more than a bag of shandy cubes, but I’m intensely grateful that my horse is a weight carrier.

Physically, he bears me effortlessly, sometimes not even feeling my puny weight on his broad back. With me on board, he can float, lift, fly, dance. His tremendous muscles and powerful skeleton carry me not only with ease, but with grace.

Yet like all the most loved horses, he often has to carry more than just my flesh and blood. This weight is something he can’t use his bone and muscle for. It’s something that will never show up on an X-ray or cause him to need hock injections.

This weight is the mass of hope and fear. It’s the burden of all the dreams and dreadings that define the complicated emotional state of the average human. It’s the heaviness of all the baggage and trauma and joy and hope and love, the sometimes intolerable weight of how much we can love. The stress we have at work, the worry we have for the people we love, the hope we have for the future, the dream we have for our dancing horse – we bring it all, I bring it all to my horse, take it aboard with me, and try to take all that stuff that makes up my messy human psyche and combine it with a half-ton flight animal and try to find something like beauty and meaning among the chaos.

Some horses can’t take the weight. Those we try to protect, pushing aside everything we feel to be the better version of ourselves that we keep for those who aren’t ready for the truth. But some horses are weight carriers, emotional sponges that patiently allow us to have a voice, without ever exchanging a single word. They hear everything we want to scream out to the world even when we keep our touch gentle. They feel it in the way we breathe, the way our spines move, the tension in our shoulders, the desperate efforts to wipe away the grabbiness from our strange and clutching hands. And it drives some horses wild; but the weight carriers, they have an ability to absorb and understand and even forgive us for our chaotic selves.

There are not many of them out there. Most horses either panic or shut down in the face of our madness if we allow ourselves to be ourselves. But as long as we keep our voices broken instead of angry, as long as we remain thankful for the wonderful thing that they do for us, some horses can bring peace and faith to the table. They don’t let us bother them. They let us be who we are, and celebrate who they are.

And some people can be that way too.

We owe these horses and people in our lives an almost unforgiveable debt. Because they are to us a tiny inkling, an earthly incarnation of a little fragment of the majestic, never-ending and far-reaching love of the God Who sees everything we are and died for us anyway, the Lord Who responds to our inconsolable and complicated craziness by calling us to come Home to the rest we can only find in His arms.

All we can do is come when He calls. And as for our horses, we have to recognise what they do for us. They didn’t ask for us. We chose them. It remains our sober responsibility to give them everything we can to make them as happy as we can in exchange for the amazing gift they offer us.

We have no real name for it, but perhaps the closest thing we can come to is acceptance.

Thank God for His unspeakable gifts. Glory to the King.