In the past few years, Elizabeth and I have been learning how to trim horses’ hooves. I felt like I was starting to really get the hang of it, when a friend asked us to do a new horse that she had acquired. Of course, I willingly said, yes, we would do it, but when we picked out the horse’s feet, we were in for a surprise. I have done several corrective setup trims in the past, but I had never seen hoofs like these before. The bars were so grossly overgrown, that the horse’s hoof was no longer being supported by the wall (which is how it should be), but the horse’s weight was being held up by its bars and putting a tremendous pressure on the sole.
I took an educated guess that all that bar was going to have to go, but having only a few times done a dramatic setup trim similar to this, I was a bit nervous to proceed without consulting a professional. So Elizabeth sent an email to a friend of ours who is does lots of hooves, and she graciously offered to come by and help us out. My gut feeling was indeed right and the horse seems to like his new “foot-do”.
As I was thinking over this situation, I thought about how we can have “over-grown hoofs” in our lives as well. If we don’t take care of the little problems right away, they will get bigger and bigger until they are ginormous. Then when God “trims” us it takes a lot of work to get us back to where we should be.