Tell Everybody, And Tell Him First

Hal had written the heifer off on the eleventh of November and he found her on the second of December, three quarters of a mile up a draw he had checked twice.

She was thin and she was fine. That is the whole medical report. She had got herself into a bit of ground behind a slip where there was still feed and still water and no way she was ever going to work out how to come back out of it, and she stood there looking at him like a woman who has been waiting in the wrong parking lot.

He got her out. It took an hour and it involved a good deal of language.

And then he was walking her down the ridge track in the last of the light, with the dog going backwards and forwards, and Hal noticed something in himself that he has been slightly embarrassed about ever since.

He was planning who to tell.

Not casually. Properly. Wentworth, who had helped him look on the seventeenth and had said, kindly, the thing people say, which is that sometimes they just do not come back. Marge at the feed store, who had asked after her twice. His daughter in Calgary, who would not care about a heifer but would care about him. And a man called Duke, who Hal has not entirely got on with for twenty years and who had said something at the time that Hal had not liked.

He was three quarters of the way down the ridge before he heard himself doing it, and when he heard it he felt about eleven years old.

A grown man of sixty-three, planning who to tell about a cow.

He said it to Wentworth about a week later, sheepishly, over a tailgate. He said, "I was that pleased I was working out who to tell all the way down the hill."

And Wentworth, who is not a talkative man and who reads more than he lets on, said: "That is in the Bible, Hal. That is the whole story."

You have felt the same slight embarrassment, most likely. Something good happens and there is an immediate, childish, undignified urge to tell people, and somewhere along the way you learned to be a bit sheepish about that. And nobody has pointed out that the urge you are embarrassed about is written straight into the middle of one of the most famous things Jesus ever said.

Jesus Put The Neighbors In The Story

Here is the part of the lost sheep story that gets skipped, because everybody stops at the shoulders.

"And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost."Luke 15:6

He calls the neighbors. Jesus did not have to include that. The story works without it. He could have ended at the carrying home, which is the image everybody paints.

Instead He puts in the bit where a grown man knocks on doors about one animal.

You have an instinct that Jesus wrote into a parable on purpose. Luke 15 puts the telling of neighbors inside the story rather than as an embarrassing afterthought, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a first century picture and stands it beside a man on a ridge track feeling eleven years old.

And notice the wording of the invitation. Rejoice with me. Not: come and hear my news. Not: let me tell you what I did. He is asking them to join something that is already going on in him, which is a different thing from reporting.

You were made to spread a gladness rather than to publish a result. That is what the written word does with joy every time it touches it, and it is the Spirit of God who turns a small human urge into something you can stop apologizing for.

Who Gets Told On The Way Down

Now here is the only thing this article would add, and it is not a correction of anything.

Nobody is telling you to tell fewer people. Tell all of them. Tell Duke. Ring your daughter who does not care about cattle. Put it on whatever you put things on.

The thing worth noticing is simply that there is a walk down the ridge, and there is always a walk down the ridge, and on that walk you are alone with the good thing and there is somebody there.

Hal was three quarters of a mile from the yard with a heifer on a rope and nobody within shouting distance. That is not an empty stretch. That is the first and best stretch, and it is available before a single phone comes out.

You have a stretch of ground between the good thing and the first person you tell, and you are not on it by yourself. It is written that He is with you always, even to the end, which means the ridge track is occupied, and His Spirit is the one who has been walking down it beside you every time.

And say the guard, because this exact spot is where a warm article turns into a scolding. Nothing here is a rule. There is no order you owe anybody, no ranking of who deserves to hear first, no audit of your last piece of good news, and nothing routed to any person or work at all. If the whole valley finds out before God gets a word, you are exactly as much His at the bottom of that hill, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the ground where scolding grows.