I needed to feed my cows, but I had a very tight schedule.  I didn’t have time to swing by my regular feed store, but I remember there was another feed store near my meeting downtown.  I swung by and got one fifty-pound bag of sweet feed, then headed to my meeting.  After the meeting was over, I headed out to my little pasture to feed up. 

My few cows have learned a white Ford F-150 truck at the gate means groceries.  They lined up at the fence in eager anticipation.  Once I made it into their pasture, they ran to the trough, ready for their “sweet treat.”   

My bull, who my grandson named “Happy (he is the only male with ten young females, so he is),” thinks he is a pet.  I have tried to explain to him that he is not a pet, but I am sure I do not help things when I rub his head before pouring out the feed.  He does get impatient when he is hungry, like a few other folks I know.  More than once, he has pushed me into the truck, trying to get at the feed.  I’ve learned to quickly open the bag before Happy gets too aggressive.   

As I poured out the feed into the trough, I noticed something unusual.  At first, my brain could not figure out the still, gray, fuzzy matter.  Then the gears in my head started turning, and I realized it was a dead mouse. 

Mice and feed go together.  When I was growing up, we kept horse feed in an old fifty-five-gallon drum.  You always look in it before you scoop because the mice often found a way in.  Though we had a tight lid on the drum, and there were no holes in the drum, the mice were there.  Maybe they beamed themselves through the metal.   

This particular bag of feed had come from the warehouse.  I figured the dead mouse chewed a hole in the bag, got in the bag, and thought he had found heaven.  There was unlimited food and no one to bother him.  I couldn’t help but notice the dead mouse was pretty plump.  I could put the story together: he ate himself to death.  Some mice, and some people, just can’t stop themselves. 

All these thoughts happened in a few seconds.  Then I saw another clump of gray fuzzy matter; only this clump was moving.  Apparently, another mouse had joined the buffet but had not yet killed himself eating.  As Happy the bull lowered his great head into the trough, his enormous black tongue scooping the feed into his mouth, this mouse was running for his life.  However, the mouse could not make it up the slick sides of the feed trough.  He would make a run and get halfway up, then slide back. 

My cows have a pecking order when it comes to food.  Happy the bull always goes first.  Then three cows that are a bit more aggressive join him, then the rest of the herd (except two shy ones) put their heads down and start chewing.  That mouse was not just running from Happy; he was running from nine cow tongues and two-hundred eighty-eight cow teeth.  You might say that the mouse was moo-tivated.   

I couldn’t just leave the mouse.  I got my shovel, waited until he made another run for the top, then pushed him out with the shovel.  I may have pushed too hard; he did a backflip before he landed.  As soon as he hit the ground, he ran off into the tall grass in desperate search of a hole. 

I thought about the fictional mouse stories I read growing up, about the city mouse and the country mouse.  This mouse had a cushy life in the feed warehouse; now, he was in a whole new environment.  No more sweet feed buffet for him.  I know mice do not think like we think, but if he could, I would bet that mouse was pretty mad that I flipped him out of that trough.  Maybe he thought he would get out, wait until the cows finished and left, and then he would crawl back in.  He had no way of knowing Happy would clean up every last bit of feed.  I doubt the mouse stopped to think, “Whoever got me out that trough saved my life.”   

I wonder how many times we get angry with God because an easy time in life comes to an end.  Sometimes we feel like we have been scooped out of our comfort zone and dropped into an alien environment.  We wonder, “Why is this happening to me?”  We do not even consider that God may have saved us from an evil that would devour us.  We might have been in danger from something worse than cow tongue and teeth. 

The next time your life gets upended, ask God to show his hand at work.  He may not have caused the problem, but his hand might be on the shovel that saves you.