Why everything we do needs the same effort put into rodeo

Why everything we do needs the same effort put into rodeo

by | Sep 26, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes

By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross

Not everything we do here leads to a winning moment or a paycheck but we’re still supposed to put our heart into everything and do the best that we can do.

At a rodeo recently, I watched a bull rider give everything he had, not just to get bucked off but to be spun into a cartwheel in the air before a hard landing. Thankfully, he was unhurt beyond the normal aches, pains and sprains a dismount like that will cause.

Many people make a career in rodeo and when you compete at that level, you have absolutely no choice but to put your best effort in. If you don’t and you compete on the rough stock side of the industry, you’re guaranteed to buck off, put yourself and others in harms way and waste your entry fees. On the timed event side, you’ve invested time and money in training and working a horse to compete alongside you and you aren’t going to shortchange yourself by putting a half-hearted barrel run together or an aimless toss of your rope. You’re going to push for the fastest time you and your horse and can achieve.

Colossians 3:23-24 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

From a Christian perspective, when we focus on just the rodeo example, we are competing for more than a paycheck. Yes we have to work hard to win, but our motivation should be to do our best because it is Him that we are representing. Paul is telling us that God wants us to work with best effort because we serve Him with an awareness that He has given us a perfect eternity in Heaven through our saving faith in Jesus.

When people know we take the Bible seriously and we don’t live our lives just for our own success, we can glorify God through doing our best. When they see and understand that it is our faith that motivates us, the attention is put on God and not our success or even our failures.

Parents will tell us it’s okay when we failed at something because we tried our best. God is glorified even if we fail when He knows we put our all into it and set that example for others.

How well we handle a win or loss can really show others how Jesus is at work transforming us.

Rodeo is just one example though. This applied to how we work any job we have even if we have the worst boss imaginable. God still expects us to put our best effort forward in every situation that involves work, from traditional employment to hobbies to helping a neighbor cut up a fallen tree.

No matter how much success we have from our efforts, when our hope is in Jesus, our real reward is a perfect eternity in Heaven.

Men don’t often hear a kind word but we need them more than we realize

Men don’t often hear a kind word but we need them more than we realize

by | Sep 5, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes

By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross

You have the ability to change the course of someone’s day or even life.

Men especially, think how often you’ve heard a compliment outside of a dating scenario (or even in a relationship). Sometimes criticism is necessary and we need to know how to receive it without getting upset, angry or defensive. But we take criticism so often at work, in relationships and from family. Sometimes it gets back to us from our extended social circles where someone out there has been criticizing or complaining about us. Sometimes it gets back to us that it was someone close to us.

It isn’t weak to admit that sometimes it’s hurtful or at the very best, discouraging. It certainly makes most of us angry and puts us in a defensive position. And the more we hear, the more it piles up and the more discouraged we can become.

More importantly, it also isn’t weak to admit that it actually feels good to hear something nice once in awhile.

It can mean even more when it comes from people out of our extended connections who we know aren’t just saying something because they’re a close friend that sees we’re frustrated or who suspect might have an agenda behind the compliment. When it comes from someone who really did observe an action we took, a way we spoke to someone or a situation we handled, it can carry more weight because we know it was sincere.

Think of someone in your extended circles and something you’ve seen them do or a way they handle themselves and text or message them right now: “hey man, I just want you to know I’ve noticed how great you are with –your daughter–how you handled that bad call by that rodeo judge–how you never seem to let that supervisor get to you– the way you always lend someone a hand.”

Look for the good in the people in your close circles and in your more distant ones.

Do not underestimate how much God can use you to lift that person out of a very bad head space you didn’t even know they were in. And don’t rob yourself of such an easy way to glorify God by following what this verse teaches us.

Ephesians 4:29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

Paul is telling us to first make sure we aren’t speaking any junk to begin with whether it’s gossiping or running someone down behind their back or even two their face or just speaking with foul language. We should only be using words and language that would be God-honoring. We forget, He is listening.

Paul then reminds us that anything we say should be for the benefit of others and that when we do this, it can point people to God’s saving grace.

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