It seems that the weather is a topic of conversation everywhere you turn. Especially here in central Texas. We depend upon the rain. When it stops raining, farmers and ranchers are placed in difficult positions. People remember droughts. They stick out in the collective memory of a community. My grandfathers often talk about the drought of the 50’s. They recall the desperate measures taken to keep livestock alive. One of the methods involved burning the needles off of the prickly pear so that the cattle could eat it. I’m sure some of the readers have performed this chore themselves. In the novel “The Time It Never Rained,” Elmer Kelton describes “burning pear.”
Cattle are creatures of habit. They will often walk the same path across a pasture to a stock tank each day. They become accustomed to the sound of a horn or siren calling them in for feed. During the drought of the 50’s, some of the cattle became trained to the sound of the propane torch used to burn pear. So much so that there are stories of cattle running across the pasture to eat the pear simply because they heard the torch. They would even burn the inside of their mouths eating the hot prickly pear. Once the drought had ended, a second problem arose. The cattle were used to eating prickly pear…only now, no one was burning off the needles. These cattle would fill their mouths and cheeks with needles trying to eat. Cattle are creatures of habit.
People are creatures of habit as well. Those of us who are Christians have been given a new nature. We have been spiritually reborn. Theologians call this regeneration. We no longer have to follow the sinful patterns of behavior that once ruled over us. But unfortunately, temptation still exists. We still struggle with past sin. Because of the Holy Spirit living inside of us, we have the ability to say “NO” to sin…but that doesn’t mean that we will always do that. Learning to battle sin is a key part of the Christian life. As we mature in our faith, we must be on an upward trajectory in our fight against temptation. Even as we struggle, we still move forward. My college pastor, Tommy Nelson, used to say “you will never be sinless, but you should start to sin less, and your sin should bother you more.”
Here is a helpful tool for battling sin. Remember the damage that sin causes. The cattle have a hard time remembering that they will get poked by the needles, but we can look back on our lives and see the destruction sin causes. The apostle Paul talks about this in Romans 6:21: “But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.”
Paul’s argument is simple. Why would you return to the things that brought about spiritual death? What will you gain by going down that old path? Why not pursue righteousness instead? See that Christ has given you something abundantly better.
It probably took some time, but some of those cattle would eventually realize that green grass was much better than prickly pear.