IN THAT TWILIGHT SEASON between pimples common sense, I began a quest for courage.
In the ranch country of western New Mexico, rodeo was more popular than football or baseball. During the summer months, this sport born of the boredom and recklessness of wild, young cowboys supplied us with recreation, socialization, and competition. There was something for everyone. The girls competed in barrel racing and pole-bending, the boys roped calves and rode broncs and bulls. In the hierarchy of rodeo, bull riding was the sport that separated the boys from the men—at least, that was the way we saw it then. I longed to find out if I was yet a man.
My heroes really have always been cowboys. Larry Mahan, Freckles Brown, and Jim Shoulders inspired courage and perseverance in me and my peers. I determined to follow in the boot prints of these legends of the professional rodeo circuit.
I was fifteen years old in the summer of 1974. I was a little old to begin riding bulls, but it had taken years of relentless pestering to secure my mother’s signature on the release form for the Catron County Rodeo. I’d practiced for months on anything I could climb onto—big calves, bony-backed brood mares, our steer being fattened for slaughter, our milk cow, and a bucking barrel: a battered fifty-five-gallon drum hung between four massive poles with car springs and steel cable.
Most of my bull-riding friends had started at the junior level, riding big steers. At fifteen, I was in the senior division. Our opponents would be real bulls, maybe not the fire-breathing demons the professionals rode, but big and bad enough to stomp a shy, skinny kid into apple butter.
On rodeo day I awakened hours before dawn. A dread seized me within moments of awakening. I raced to the bathroom to throw up. After doing my chores and making a failed attempt at breakfast, I loaded my gear into a battered, white-and-red 1961 Ford pickup and drove to the arena. Hours passed before the rodeo started, and bull riding was the final event. The New Mexico sun was not yet heavy, but my shirt was damp with a sweat made rank from terror.
The stock contractor providing the four-legged athletes had pulled in sometime late in the night. The pens were full of roping cattle, bucking horses—and bulls. They rested, and the drone of flies or an occasional horn bumping the pipe rails of the corral were the only sounds. I climbed the fence, wondering which bull would be my dance partner later that afternoon. My throat was pinched dry.
The time passed slowly. I watched my friends who competed in other events, but I didn’t really see them. During the girls’ barrel racing, I went to find the Porta-johns. Bull riding would be next. I found a vacancy, closed the door, and leaned against it as I fought nausea, confessed all known sin, prepared myself to enter the kingdom, and wept in fear.
Would I die today? Worse, Would I be revealed as a coward? I opened my eyes to find a black widow spider dangling just inches from my face. A bad sign, I thought. I swatted it with my hat.
That first ride was over in an instant, memorable only for the blinding speed with which I bounced from the ground and climbed the fence. But even in that instant something amazing happened. The fear and apprehension had melted. A heightened sense of clarity and a surreal sense of invincibility welled within me as I strutted back behind the chutes to take off my chaps and spurs. I may not have made it to the whistle, but I had been valiant in the attempt.
As I walked behind the chutes, just moments after facing the greatest fear of my life, a poster tacked to a post announced another youth rodeo the next weekend in Silver City. I would be there. I was a bull rider.
A transaction took place that day. In exchange for my weakness, I found strength. By cashing in my fears, I found freedom. My identity and destiny began to take shape. I was no longer just another nondescript kid at Reserve High School. I had paid my dues, endured the initiation rites, and waged war in the arena. Everyone who knew me knew: He rides bulls.
Liars and dreamers
Friends who grew up in suburbia listen to my cowboy stories with a mixture of incredulity and pity. Why would anyone attempt such an insane sport? Any explanation sounds weak. It’s about exploring your limits. It’s about overcoming weakness. And it’s a lot about turning fantasy into reality.
Bull riding occupies much more of one’s life than the actual eight-second ride. For days, even weeks before a competition, I would choke back my fears. A dozen times a day I would visualize the sequence of events that I wanted to take place at the next rodeo.
I would straddle the bull in the chute, stroke the tail of that flat-plaited rope until the resin smoked, then slide my gloved hand into the braided handhold as someone pulled the rope tight. I’d wrap the sticky tail around my fist (split-finger wrap with a twist), find my seat, set my spurs, and nod for the gate.
In my dreams, what happened next was a synchronous ballet of power between man and beast. The bull led; I responded with catlike grace. When the buzzer sounded, I would pull the tail of the rope to free my hand, then swing my leg over the bull’s hump, landing on my feet with nonchalance. The judges score always put me in first place, beyond the reach of any competitor yet to ride.
The dream did not stop with a trophy buckle and prize money. After the rodeo came the rodeo dance. Surely every buckle bunny in the stands that day had noticed my performance. That night they would queue up for the chance to two-step in my arms, while Johnny Hatch and the Ramblers played “Silver Wings”by Merle Haggard.
These were good—the pre-ride dreams. Their power came from knowing that this was all within the realm of possibility. This could really happen, I told myself over and over again.
Better were the post-ride dreams. Like warriors home from battle, young cowboys relived those rides over and over again. Behind the chutes at another rodeo, at school or work, the ritual continued as we provided color commentary for each seconds-long ride in minutes-long detail. We put backspin on our tales, minimizing our brothers’ errors of judgment and balance, embellishing the near-death exposure to horns and hooves, all the while illustrating with a pantomime of lifting and reaching, spurred boots hooking the air, free arm reaching for balance.
“I thought you had him covered till your feet got behind you and you slid into the well. If you’da just pushed when he faded, you coulda recovered. Too bad. I reckon you’da been 80 or higher.”(Translated, “You never had a chance.”)
As we bonded, tales of war eventually led into tales of love. A brief dance with a gum-popping freshman was sculpted into a passionate affair of the heart. Liars and dreamers then, we were innocent of both death and love.
Not surprisingly, my memories are much fresher than the way things really happened. Some twenty years later, I can still believe my worst rides were good; my best approached some sacred transcendent state.
In reality, most rides lasted just a few heartbeats; more often than not, they were accompanied by bruises, blood, and a shirt stained with manure.
The girls? Not until adulthood did I witness the minimalist interchange between shy adolescent males and wary adolescent females, and then I realized how far afield our fantasies had taken us.
The realities and the dreams of bull riding shaped me in ways I know only a little about. The transaction was emotional—the way I spent money, the crease in my hat, the people I called friends. All these decisions were made from my identity as a bull rider.
A physical transaction also occurred when I first straddled 1,500 pounds of enraged beef. An immediate and significant addiction to adrenaline allowed my hypothalamus to hold my body hostage. Former world-champion cowboy and Grammy-Award-winning singer Chris LeDoux sings, “He’s addicted to danger, ruled by passion and pride. To pain and fear he’s no stranger, all he knows is he’s got to ride.”1
Even so, several close calls, including a head butt from a bull called Spiderman that left me muddled for days, finally convinced me that I’d never achieve enough glory or riches in the sport to justify all the expense and pain. I’d just have to find my adrenal rush elsewhere. But rodeo had been good to me; it had accomplished its purpose. I knew I was no coward.
Addicted to danger
The day I preached my first sermon (which lasted much longer than my first bull ride), I knew I had found a worthy substitute. The physical risks were minimal in comparison, but emotionally the hazards were world-class. Standing in a pulpit caused my hypothalamus to order up that same delicious punch of fear, hope, and fantasy that it had learned to crave years before.
In The Maverick Mindset, Doug Hall and David Wecker write, “Courage has a tangible quality. You can’t touch it, but you can feel it. It feels like positive acceleration. Courage sends a rush of energy through your body. It makes you wake up in the morning with a feeling of wanting to wrap your hands around the day.”2
My courage was put to the test weekly. No eight-second-ride, the sermon lasted thirty minutes. I had six days to savor the event, consider the possibilities, and fear the consequences—then a day to relish and rehash the event. No wonder the Sunday sermon quickly became the axis around which life turned. I have lived and died by the weekly sermon. Monday through Saturday, ideas and possibilities, hopes and fears were churning, colliding, escaping:
- Lives could be changed by this message. What if I choke?
- Here’s the perfect introduction. Am I being faithful to the text?
- Grieving people will find comfort. Do I really understand this myself?
- Hard hearts will be melted. What is my thesis?
- Broken homes will be restored. Who am I to speak for God?
- I think I’ve got it now. How little I’ve prayed.
- Does anyone ever really listen to the sermon? But how shall they hear without a preacher?
- I can’t do this one more time. Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel.
Then it was Sunday—rodeo time. I stepped into the pulpit, began to speak, and in a heartbeat it was over. I picked myself up out of the dust and walked out of the arena, heart thumping.
How I needed to measure the immeasurable!
A few kind comments from a congregant at the door could be interpreted a hundred ways. Later on I’d ask a hopeful question of my wife, Susan, over dinner, “So, how’d you think it went today?”I often needed not a post-ride analysis but simply the acknowledgment that I was valiant in the effort.
Then it was Monday again. Perhaps a bit of dreaming with peers at the coffee shop. But it was time to look ahead. There was another bull to ride. Another week of fighting down fears while preparing to assault the gates of hell once more through the spoken Word.
Surprise transformation
In June of 1995 I left the pastorate. I abandoned the rigors of weekly sermon preparation for a ministry comprised primarily of writing about ministry, especially preaching; editing articles, many related to preaching, and interviewing other preachers. I still preach regularly but usually to strangers. Out of this change came a desire to explore the aspects of preaching that no one talks much about.
This book is mostly about the amalgam of sacred and selfish motives that compel people to preach and to be passionate about preaching. It’s a book for preachers who discover that sometimes they are more interested in impressing people than illuminating God. Like bull riding, preaching can turn our guts to water and our brains to shaving cream.
We can’t understand our fears and failures without pondering the realization of Paul: “God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe”(1 Cor. 1:21, niv).
Most who read that verse won’t understand it, but preachers do. You and I are insiders to one of God’s greatest surprises: God chooses sometimes foolish people and their sometimes foolish words to change lives. To us belongs the unmerited joy of knowing that God has set us apart for this privilege of preaching, and, once in a great while, we see the results of faithful preaching. We elbow each other in the ribs, knowing that preachers are in the running with platypuses as candidates for God’s grandest joke.
That I’ve been granted the gift of preaching has been confirmed over and over again, but that has been countered by an abundant measure of conflict and heartache. I’ve been swollen with pride and anesthetized by depression. When I read books on the inner life, I sometimes fear I haven’t reached even the starting line, much less made any progress in the race.
I have been startled to realize that while preaching has been at the heart of my insecurities, it has also been the primary instrument through which God has been most at work in my journey Christward. I never paid much attention to what God was doing in me as I preached; I was mostly worried about what God was doing in them. I’ve begged God to be at work in them; we both knew how much they needed it!
Yet in the midst of my mixed motives, my fears, my hope, and my hurt, a spiritual transaction was taking place. I understood, sort of, that in the sermon my weaknesses were transformed into something that ministered to others. But what a surprise to find out that within me weakness was creating strength and courage.
Volumes of speculation have been written about the nature of Paul’s thorn in the flesh. A chronic illness? Depression? Bad eyesight? I think the Scriptures are purposefully vague so we might fill in the blank with our own weakness. Why not preaching with all its inefficiencies and foibles? To me, the text sounds just like a preacher in Monday morning prayers:
“Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, ‘My gracious favor is all you need. My power works best in your weakness.’
“So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may work through me. Since I know it is all for Christ’s good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong”(2 Cor. 12:8-10, nlt).
If “my weaknesses … insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities” isn’t a description of preaching, I don’t know what is. Yet, like you, I face the difficulties of preaching. Because I’ve ridden that brutal bull named “Sermon” week after victorious week after crushing week, I am a changed man, a stronger man. Week after week, a transformation is taking place. Weakness gives way to courage.
Hooked on an Eight-Second Ride,”Watcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy? Liberty Records.
Doug Hall and David Wecker, The Maverick Mindset (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell
