by Ryan Schnee, Village Missionary at Middle Lake Gospel Church
Calving season on a farm is a time of joy, hard work, and sometimes tragedy. When troubles arise, a parishioner who is new to the cattle industry occasionally consults me for my previous experience. On Easter Sunday he called to tell me about a newborn calf that didn’t seem to belong to any of the cows that had calved. We talked and concluded that it was a twin and its mother had only claimed and accepted one of the calves that she had born.
For the farmer, this resulted in a lot of extra work. The calf needed to be brought in and bottle fed initially. Then the presumed mother was brought in from the pasture and kept in a small pen with both calves. However, she still refused to recognize the one calf as her own. As a result, the farmer had to restrain the cow in a squeeze chute twice a day so that the calf could suck. This was a time-consuming process! The farmer wondered if he should sell or give the calf away, but I explained that sometimes an extra twin calf can be valuable if another calf dies.
Unfortunately, a few days later, one of his calves did die while the cattle were huddled up trying to shelter from a storm. Now the abandoned twin would no longer be a nuisance, but a blessing!
Preparing for Adoption
Again, I received the call to help him. The first step was to skin the dead calf so that I had a “sweater” or “jacket” that could be put on the calf to be adopted. We slipped this over the calf’s head and pushed its legs into the leg holes so that the hide covered the calf’s body and neck.
You or I wouldn’t be fooled by this because we can see the little brown calf’s head and back legs peeking out of his new black coat. But because the cow identified her calf primarily by smell, she believed that the brown calf in the black jacket was hers. When she smelled it, she smelled the skin of her calf and accepted the new calf as her own.
After putting the cow in the squeeze chute a couple of times to make sure that the calf would suck, the bonding process was complete. The cow accepted the abandoned twin as her own. After a few days, the smell of the cow’s original calf and her adopted calf began to blend, and the black jacket was taken off, and the once abandoned twin now looks forward to summer and green grass with a new mother.
We Were Adopted
You might find this fascinating, or maybe you think it’s repulsive, but in the joys, hard work, and tragedies of a calving season, we find a wonderful illustration of what God has done for us!
When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, they realized that they were naked, and they were ashamed. They were afraid to come into God’s presence, so God provided clothes for them made from animal skins (Genesis 3:21). This foreshadowed how God would one day provide his Son, who died willingly so that we could be adopted as God’s children.
“But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship” (Galatians 4:4–5, NIV). His blood shed on the cross became our covering so that we could be clothed in his righteousness. “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Galatians 3:26–27). Unlike the calf’s temporary jacket, we are to remain clothed with Christ, so we may be found in him, not having a righteousness of our own, but having a righteousness which comes through faith in Christ (Philippians 3:8).
