Mitch

---

Not all sacred ground is a place.

Sometimes it’s a season of life.

When we were serving a small country church years ago, a rancher in the congregation called to ask if we wanted a calf. His mother had died, and he thought our kids might enjoy bottle feeding him.

That’s how Mitch came into our lives.

I drove out to the ranch to pick him up, but I didn’t own a cattle trailer. Instead, I folded down the back seat of my wife’s SUV and loaded him in the back like an oversized passenger. Mitch rode home in the family car, blinking at the world through the windows.

We lived out in the country, so we had room to build a small pen while he was still young. The kids took responsibility for feeding him. Morning and evening they carried the bottle out to the pen, where Mitch would greet them with the kind of enthusiasm only a hungry calf can muster.

He also liked to buck while drinking.

The bottle would bounce, the kids would get scared, and the pen would fill with the s dust from the commotion.

Somewhere in the middle of those ordinary days — church services, school schedules, football, tennis, and basketball practice, and sermon preparation — there was this unexpected rhythm of life on the small patch of ground we called home.

One evening I painted Mitch while listening to a high school football game on the radio. I used a single brush for the entire painting, letting the simple strokes follow the quiet memory forming in real time.

Looking back now, I realize those were sacred days.

Not because anything extraordinary happened, but because life was unfolding in the small faithful rhythms that shape a family: children learning responsibility, a congregation sharing life beyond Sunday morning, and a young pastor discovering that ministry sometimes looks like bottle feeding a calf in the evening light.

Sacred ground is not always a church building or a hill where people gather to pray.

Sometimes it’s a small pen behind the house and a calf named Mitch.