I have been thinking a lot about change and just how hard it can be.
What brought me to this point was cows—or more specifically their hooves.
I know almost nothing about cows. But that hasn’t stopped me from being hypnotised by someone on Facebook called “Nate the Hoof Guy.”
Nate is, as his name suggests, a hoof guy. This means that he goes to cattle farms and trims and treats ailing hooves of all kinds.
There is a machine called a “crush” in which you can put a cow or even a bull, which holds it safe and still while a painful hoof gets treated.
Nate records his hoof treatments with closeup video and then shares this with a helpful voiceover.
He is a careful worker and a master of his art, which involves extremely sharp paring knives of various sizes.
Bovine hooves are amazing. They alone should make you believe in intelligent design.
But if you already believe in that (which you should), then the stuff that goes wrong with them can really get you thinking about your spiritual life.
Hooves crack, split, get abscesses, get stones stuck in them, and get infected.
The cow can’t fix this, so it just grows more hoof to compensate. Eventually it can barely walk.
So in comes Nate. He is given a filthy sodden hoof to treat—but he doesn’t waste time cleaning the outside.
He goes straight in with the knives and an angle grinder with a hoof-trimming attachment (yes, you can buy them).
Off it all comes, and you see the beautiful white hoof material underneath, with a few marks on it.
But Nate’s not fooled. He knows which of these marks are just stains, and which are potentially very bad news.
He pares away that lovely white clean surface to uncover some really horrible things.
Sometimes the corium—the sensitive “heart” of the hoof—is in deep trouble and needs a lot of help.
Then he floods the wounds with chlorhexidine (an antiseptic that doesn’t sting as much).
He packs them with salicylic acid powder to dry them and provide pain relief.
Then he bandages the hoof with brightly coloured self-sticking bandage tape.
He also puts a plastic block on the other claw (two claws make up a hoof) so that the cow doesn’t put as much pressure on the wounded part.
The best part is seeing the cow walk away at the end of the procedure, no longer limping and now able to walk normally.
Cows whose hooves don’t get treated become what are called “downers.” They struggle to get up at all.
Even once they get their hooves treated, they’ve gotten so used to sitting down that they can’t get up again.
The whole thing is absolutely fascinating to watch, especially from a safe distance.
It’s also one of the best analogies for human sinfulness that I’ve seen in a long time.
We sin and we can’t fix it, so we simply grow more hoof to try to cover it.
We buy more stuff, swagger more, or self-medicate more.
We present a lovely white clean surface to the world, but underneath it’s eating us alive. Eventually we can barely walk.
But you can bet we don’t want to go into the “crush” of the confessional and let Fr Nate look at that hoof.
And yet Jesus wants to act through Fr Nate to drain those wounds, remove those stones, and bandage us up again.
If you could see the stuff that comes out of those hooves, imagine how much more beautiful it is to see stuff coming out of our souls.
I think this is why there is more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over all those other cows with sound hooves.
But how hard it is to admit that there’s ugly stuff in us in the first place. We think we’re doing such a good job of fooling everyone.
No wonder Jesus denounced people like this as “whited sepulchres” (Matt 23:27).
That tiny crack in the façade can have an abscess underneath that’s aching to drain. You won’t heal until it does.
Yes, it will hurt. But probably not as much as you imagine it’s going to hurt.
The church can be described as a field hospital, but I didn’t expect the fields to be quite so literal.
Its hoof guys also have centuries of experience in the gentle but necessary art of peeling back the layers and allowing Jesus to do the healing.
How are your spiritual hooves? Are you at risk of becoming a “downer”?
