Our Kind of Love

"Just like driving on an open highway, never knowing what we're gonna find, like two kids, baby, always trying to live it up...yeah thats our kind of love."

I looked up an old video that I love this morning and found some new ones - that I love just as much; they are without a doubt about endurance horseback riding. One that I found was put together to this song by Lady Antebellum and it is bits and pieces of rides from here to there by someone who may not even do endurance but its placed perfectly in order and ends with only hoof steps on pavement. What a way to love a 'thing'! What an ability to have a desire to be part of something that is more than anything else in my life! I have this ability to connect with horses, mostly because I love them and always have but also because as I've have aged (haha), I've learned to appreciate them as part of me. This song talks about a couple that is in love and going thru life without a care in the world and just taking every obstacle as it comes, just like we do in endurance.
I have in the past connected this blog with endurance riding, maybe because I connect best through the love that I have for my horses. And in the past, I have found a verse or words (usually from someone else) to describe my connection between endurance riding and my journey through the trials of the past year. But this morning, I am not finding that connection. Instead, I have found a new connection with the 2 or 3 links above, a new sort of way to see endurance. 
1Tim 6:11 "But you, man of God, flee from all of this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and patience."
I have fled from many things in my life in as many ways as possible from hiding inside of my head to ignoring those around me and everything in between but something tells me this is not the kind of fleeing that is being referenced here. What I did find throughout my life was an ability to escape from my life in sort of a fantasy world of my own on horses. And I was not patient, faithful or loving in any pursuit of riding. I was aggressive, active, demanding, requiring, and sometimes mean. Looking back at my life with horses, I see a life that is also similar to this verse. I have aged and have begun to see things that I missed in my past, like growth to faith, struggle to love, and weakness to patience and endurance. And I learned most of these things through a horse.
I am not currently riding, I had a plan and then let it slip away and haven't returned to it, but this morning, in light of new faith, I find that I really miss being inside of that partnership between me and my horse. Why? Because just like the song above, every time I ride it is an adventure on an open highway and everytime I learn and go a little more toward the ever so new person that I am starting to see. I will start this partnership once more very soon, moving along toward a goal that only I am aware of and one that my horse has to be free enough to take me on. A partnership that started in anxiousness, ability, control and determination that has now moved toward unity, patience, faith, and love. I don't know how God is navigating the exact way to your heart, but to mine He used and escape, in the form of an animal, that was as high spirited and anxious as I, and through her He pursued me. Through her He is bringing us full circle, from looking at to looking through, from being alone and with no purpose to being a partnership with more than one purpose. Endurance riding isn't for the faint at heart, the weak who think the horse can not handle the task, it is like faith, a direction built solely on one trusting another, with no hesitation and no looking back.