An Unwanted Vacation

Winter set in with a vengeance, and the track at Victory Haven looked more like a skating rink than a training facility. UB’s explosive cough was likely an effect of the Polycrap but it needed attention, so rather than risk the well being of the horses, we convinced Joe to let us give everyone a break on the farm. It would, we pointed out, also give his bank account a bit of a break. He didn’t agree, because as he pointed out, horses can’t make any money standing on the farm. Finally Joe relented, albeit grudgingly.

We assumed that UB would enjoy being afforded a little R&R, and reconnecting with a couple of his old buddies—namely Digging Deep and J. Hamilton.

While Digger was happier than a pig in slop (and usually resembled one) The Hamster had a distinctively different take on farm life. Especially farm life in the dead of winter. The Princess, as my friend Jeanne had dubbed Ham, quickly convinced UB that farm life was the pits.

Heaven forbid it began to get dark and we were still readying the barn! Together Ham and UB would stand at the gate of their paddock and neigh frantically—it was really more like screaming—until we humanoids could stand it no longer and relented, bringing them in—ready or not.

March was approaching and decent weather days began to outnumber the bad, so back to the track we went, and not a moment too soon for The Unbelievable. He certainly hadn’t lost much in the way of fitness, as pacing back and forth along the fenceline kept his muscles taut.

By the time UB was ready for his next race, Turfway Park was winding down the winter meet. Jerry decided to drop UB back down in class to the level where he had run 3rd--for a couple of reasons. One was to make it as easy as possible on UB coming back from his layoff. The second reason was in hopes of having some money flow back into Joe’s bank account.

Victor Lebron’s stock was rising in the racing world, and at entry time he was in high demand, so our hopes of having him as UB’s pilot for a second race were dashed. Another young rider, Orlando Mojica, was purported to be talented and was available. But the question remained to be answered—could he and UB traverse the track as one?

DAILY NOTES: A couple more important truths from 21 Reasons…

2. God has given us plenty of explanation if we will only look for it and accept it.

The Bible gives many principles and examples to point us toward potentially productive reasons bad things happen to good people. The stories of Christians who have battled severe suffering show that God is able to produce much good from the bad we encounter.

And

3. God can do more than one good thing through the bad things that happen to us.

I’m going to use myself as an example to the above. With each passing blow to my sanity in 2010, I went to the Bible and found that so much worse had happened to so many others, and they had come out the other side better than before. And, when I could look past my self-pity, I had to acknowledge that indeed, if it didn’t kill me, it had to be making me stronger, right? It was certainly making me wiser and more dependent on God than on myself. Ah ha! Something good from something bad!

Slowly Making Progress

We were feeling quite encouraged by both UB’s good gate behavior and his third place finish, even though the company he kept in that race was of a lesser caliber. He needed that race to regain his fitness and he seemed to handle the Poly OK, so four weeks later, we looked to Turfway Park again—this time upping the competition level by entering in a maiden special weight event.

But, alas, a problem arose. Edgar Paucar, the only jockey to date that UB seem inclined to allow to remain on his back for an entire race had been injured in a spill. Mr. Paucar was sidelined for an indeterminate amount of time with a badly broken leg, so we were forced to look elsewhere for a rider.

Enter Victor Lebron, at that time a neophyte rider new to Kentucky. Being the new jock on the block generally means you can’t be too picky about your mounts, and luckily for us, he wasn’t. As UB’s reputation seemed to travel ahead of him wherever we went, we assumed Victor was either that hungry for mounts or that much of a blockhead. It was the former.

Victor stayed in the irons, and UB, who didn’t have the best of trips, found himself carried 4 wide coming out of the turn and scrambling to make up ground. Although he finished 6th, UB ran a decent race considering the serious step up in company, and Victor made all the right post-race jockey noises thanking us for the opportunity and saying that he liked the horse.

UB, for his part, stretched his neck straight out and coughed explosively.

“Uh Oh,” said I.

DAILY NOTES: Dave Earley, in the introduction to 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, states that his book is a ‘biblical study of potential benefits that come into our lives through suffering.’ Earley frames the discussion by first reminding us of four important truths.

1. God is under no obligation to give us an explanation for suffering. We don’t want to hear it, but it’s true. God is under no obligation to answer our questions. In this life, we may never see or fully understand why many things happen. That’s what faith is about. It is trusting God in the midst of, trusting God in spite of, trusting God not only when we can see, but also when we cannot see.

Earley goes on to say that a god that he can completely comprehend is no God at all. He is glad that the God he worships, the God he serves and the God he trusts in the midst of suffering, pain and evil is bigger than he can totally understand. God is bigger than we can figure out, and therefore big enough to see us through.

When Last We Left UB

When last we left UB (which seems a very long time ago!) he had just finished 3rd in his first start for trainer Jerry Wylie. If you’ll remember, just making it into and then out of the starting gate with all four feet on the ground was a tremendous amount of progress. Finishing “in the money” was icing on the cake.

UB’s third at Turfway was racing on a synthetic surface, which had quickly become all the rage in the racing world. At this point in time, fraught with bad press raining down due to tragedies like the breakdowns suffered by Barbaro and Eight Belles, Thoroughbred racing was seeking to improve its image. And fast.

As is so common in our industry, the sport was all about the quick fix. Many tracks jumped on the bandwagon, trading in their old dirt racing surfaces for the “poly,” touted by it’s creators to greatly increase safety and vastly reduce catastrophic breakdowns.

Turfway was the first Kentucky track to switch to this surface, produced under such names as Polytrack and Tapeta. This type of racing surface was composed of ground up rubber and carpet fibers and was supposed to allow moisture to drain right through, so that horses would no longer ever race on a “sloppy” track.

The California racing commission even went so far as to mandate all of their tracks to switch to synthetic surfaces—a move that forced the closure of tracks that could not afford to do so.

But what happened, as racing commenced on the “Poly-crap,” as many horsemen began to refer to it, is that a different kind of injury became common. Soft tissue injuries like bowed tendons and blown suspensories were seen more and more. Horses hacked and coughed and snorted and blew as they cooled out after races and sometimes for days after due to the airborne carpet fibers they sucked into their lungs as they raced.

And horsemen were told that if they had “grass” horses that preferred running on turf instead of dirt the Poly was the kind of track for them. Well, not exactly, as it seems that the Poly was an entirely new experience—a third entity—and yet another surface that a horse might possibly love or possibly hate.

UB was lukewarm about it, but as we were about to find out, when it came to racing it was always UB’s way or the highway.

DAILY NOTES: I got used to waking in the morning with a WWF-like announcer’s voice in my head screaming “In this corner, we have the darkest force walking the Earth…the Prince of Darkness…aka Satan. In that corner, appearing shaky and scared and trying not to embarrass Christ by calling herself a Christian and then doing something un-Christian-like…Shon Wylie! LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!

Some days the best I could to as far as prayer went was to beg “Please, God, just don’t leave me.” I would also pray for my temper not to get the best of me, which happens a lot. But as I began to read 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, I realized that I might finally be able to point my friend toward an answer to her question. And draw the strength I needed to get through each day.

Dave Earley’s book begins:

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a question we all ask. Every day in the newspaper we read the tragic tales of suffering, pain, and evils on planet Earth. Horribly bad things happen to very good people. Men with large families and women who are single moms lose their jobs. People get cancer. There are devastating floods and fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. Babies die or are born with crippling diseases. People are robbed, mugged, raped, abused and murdered. In some parts of the world, Christians are tortured for their faith.

Seeing it all laid out like that in print made me see just how preposterous it must seem to some that a loving, all-powerful God exists.

Beginning Again--Again

As the long days at Mike Rowland’s bedside wore on, and the doctors’ prognosis’ gave Tammy no hope at all, eventually she was forced to make the most difficult decision anyone can have to make.

Mike’s memorial service was well attended. Friends, family and his racetrack “family” filled the space provided by Turfway Park. After the service, as Tammy was being comforted by hugs and condolences she was approached by the trainer of the horse that broken down, causing the spill. He pressed into her hand a check in the amount of $5,000 and moved on.

Tammy stared at the check in disbelief. Disbelief turned to anger. What exactly was this check supposed to represent? The price of her husband’s life? What a ridiculously inappropriate thing to do. She disposed of the check as if it was contaminated.

Weeks passed and turned to months. Every once in awhile Mark, still dealing with his own demons, would drop by to check on Tammy, and they would talk. Tammy would open up about her now up-ended life, and Mark would tell her of his efforts to regain control of his. They helped each other through this very difficult time.

Eventually, friendship turned to love and they married. They briefly left the racetrack—the scene of so much pain—and proceeded to make a living out in the “real world.”

But as happens more often than not with racetrackers, the world of racing soon sucked them right back in. That was right about the time that Jerry and I met them, as their horse transport business was getting underway.

DAILY NOTES: Why does God allow bad things happen to good people? I was first hit squarely between the eyes with this question by an old friend of mine from high school. This inherently good person (who was at that very moment in the middle of doing a wonderful thing for me) asked the aforementioned with what I can only describe as venom in her voice. This friend looks to most people like someone who has the world by the tail, but in truth throughout her life she’s dealt with some tough stuff.

“I mean really, Shon,” she practically sneered, “if God is so good, if there even is a God, why would he let people suffer? Why doesn’t he just stop all the bad stuff from happening?”

This is the same old dusty refrain sung by virtually every atheist or agnostic that I’ve crossed paths with over the years. Funny thing about atheists, in my experience—as sure as they are that God doesn’t exist, they can never seem to argue their position very convincingly. But I digress.

I wanted so desperately to provide an answer to that question that would make sense of everything—but all I could do was stammer and stutter, which produced little but a ‘see-I-told-you-so’ look from my friend. I didn’t want to get it wrong, so I didn’t say anything at all.

Flash forward a few years to last summer, when I myself was posing a similar question to my Creator. Like a whiney little kid, I found myself bargaining with God. “C’mon God,” I would say, “can’t you see how hard I’m trying here? Why are things getting harder instead of easier for us?”

The answer to that question was clearly “Because I love you, and you’re not nearly tough enough yet for what lies ahead.” Gulp.

Nightmares Can Come True, Too

By way of offering up somewhat of an explanation for the lapse in postings, I can only say that 2010, thankfully, is now behind me. It kicked my butt, but now it’s gone. My fervent hope and prayer is that this year will not be quite so tumultuous.

No one died or even came close, so I really cannot complain. And in retrospect, I think the whole of last year was by some grand plan designed to make me put up or shut up. Literally.

I mean, the title of this blog is Testing God. So should it surprise me that perhaps God is doing a little testing of his own? The hits came from all directions—financial, emotional, physical—things that stuck at the core of my beliefs and betrayals by those I thought I knew. Things from out of the blue that I never in my wildest dreams saw coming.

At one point, I told my husband that I was literally afraid to answer the phone, open the door or even poke my head out from under the covers in the morning for fear of what the new day would bring.

But a funny thing happened on my way to the psych ward—I realized that while I thought I had surrendered all to God and was fully relying on Him, truth is, I hadn’t even come close to that. I probably still have a ways to go in being totally reliant, but 2010 brought me much, much closer.

And while I am certainly not saying I’m hoping for more bad stuff to rain down, I can say with certainty that the silver lining is that by turning to God, I made it through. I’m still standing, I learned a lot and I love God even more than in 2009, when it seemed I had the world by the tail and He was giving me everything I wanted.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my wonderful husband and two very good friends, all of whom were never too busy for me, even when all I could do was sob.

As I sought answers to my constant question of “what the heck, God?” a woman who shared a barn with us at the track this summer handed me a book which she declared to be one of the best books she’d ever read. After reading it myself, I tend to agree. Between that book and the Good Book (particularly the Book of Job!) I cried, screamed, cursed and questioned my way through the second half of last year. So, since I have pretty much finished up the material from Rich Toward God, the focus of my Daily Notes will now be geared toward material from Dave Earley’s 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People. I’ll begin with them next post.

And now, on with the blog:

Somewhere along the line Mark realized that his substance abuse problem and the ensuing financial problems caused by drugs and his agent were dragging down his career and his life, and he worked hard to get his life back on track.

Mark was clean and sober at the time of the accident. I remember him telling us that as he lay on the track for what seemed like an eternity, he called over to Mike, who at that time was still conscious, to offer encouragement.

“I was so cold, laying there shivering in the mud,” Mark recalled. “I remember thinking how I just wanted a blanket and wondering what was taking so long to get help for us.”

By the time he was being transported to the hospital, the pain from his broken bones and other injuries was excruciating.

“I told the ambulance driver, just in case I was unconscious when we got to the hospital, to make sure that the doctors didn’t give me anything addictive for the pain.” The sadness in Mark’s voice was enormous.

“When we got to the hospital, I was still awake so I told the doctors and nurses the same thing. I told them why it was so important that they choose my medications carefully. But when I woke up from surgery, I found out they had put me on morphine, and I knew I was in trouble.”

Released from the hospital with a long recovery ahead and some hard-core drugs at his disposal, Mark went home to recuperate at his mother’s house.

Mark’s battle with drugs was back on, and he wondered if he was strong enough to win it yet again. There were certainly many reasons to give in—a long, painful rehab and a good friend on life support were the two that came immediately to mind.

Mark found himself easing back into his old ways as the pain from his injuries and the anguish of wondering if there was anything, anything he could have done--should have done—differently that fateful night on the track nagged at him.

And then:

Dazed and confused, Mark woke up shivering on the floor of an isolation cell in what he assumed to be a detention center. Apparently the victim of a total blackout, Mark felt his blood run cold when he was informed of what went down the night before.

Mark remembered getting into his car after taking some pain meds and stopping to party with some friends. What he didn’t remember was the police trying to pull him over. Instead of pulling over, he led the troopers (by now there were a few of them) on a high speed chase down a busy in-town four lane road and eventually out a twisted, turning country road where Mark was eventually apprehended, thrown to the ground, cuffed, scruffed and jailed. Mark remembers none of this.

Dreams Can Come True

Racing is a sport that can make dreams come true in a flash. And it can break your heart just as quickly. One day, you are at the top of your game—plenty of money, plenty of clients—the world is your oyster, as they say.

But if you are young and impetuous when all the fame and money comes your way, you may find yourself facing the best of times and the worst of times all at the same time.

Mark was an unlikely candidate to become a top jockey. In high school, football was his preference. He loved the game, but he was a little on the small side to be taken seriously. Mark kind of liked horses, and since so many folks had told him that because of his size he should become a jockey, he decided to pay a visit to the racetrack.

A country boy from Marion County, Kentucky, he ventured out to Keeneland one day and crossed paths with a lady by the name of Lee McKinney—a tough-as-nails, dyed-in-the-wool horsewoman.

Mark and Lee struck a deal. She would teach Mark how to ride, and while he was learning, he would work his keister off in her stable. It worked out well for both of them, and as fate would have it, Mark turned out to be a natural with horses. They liked him, and even more importantly, they ran for him.

And so began the rise of a young man’s star in the racing world. Winning an Eclipse Award as an apprentice jockey pretty much assures the recipient of getting plenty of really good mounts. Which in turn assures success. And prestige. And gobs of money.

And gobs of money, if you are not extremely mature (and who of us, being entirely honest, can say that in our youth we were?) can in turn make for some big problems.

Between hanging out with their agents after the races and being wined and dined by owners and trainers, there is ample opportunity for top jockeys to party.

For Mark, the growth spurt that he had wished for in high school that would have allowed him to pursue his dream of playing football unfortunately kicked in after he began riding. As is the case for so many jockeys, Mark’s weight became his mortal enemy.

There are two kinds of “flippers” on the racetrack. The horse kind is represented by The Unbelievable. They “flip” upside down in starting gates and trailers. The second kind, represented by many jockeys, binge eat and then vomit, or “flip.” Not a pretty thought, but extremely common in the Jock’s Room at any racetrack.

Although he was still expected to socialize with clients after the races, Mark was finding it harder and harder to sit through dinner without eating when he was ravenous, so he drank instead—rum and Diet Coke. And there was, of course, the abundance of the other kind of coke, which may solve the hunger problem but generally causes much bigger troubles from the standpoint of both addiction and finances.

Daily Notes: This scripture comes from 1 Timothy 6: 17-19:

Tell those rich in this world’s wealth to quit being so full of themselves and so obsessed with money, which is here today and gone tomorrow. Tell them to go after God, who piles on all the riches we could ever manage—to do good, to be rich in helping others, to be extravagantly generous. If they do that, they’ll build a treasury that will last, gaining life that is truly life.

The Message

Hmmm…money is here today and gone tomorrow is right—just look at what the stock market has done over the past couple of years and you have proof of that! I grew up with a dad that wanted for me what he called “security.” A steady job that would provide a good paycheck, regular raises, medical and dental insurance and a good retirement income.

Tell me, does that even exist anymore? I mean, it did back in his day. Unfortunately, even if it did still exist, as I’ve told you all before, I am afflicted with career A-D-D. And since it seems like our income is never, ever of the “steady” variety, when it does come in (usually in hunks at random times) I am prone to squirreling it away. My husband calls me a rat-holer. What I don’t have rat-holed away in a bank account, IRA or piece of property I have rat-holed away in some actual rat-hole-like spot in the house. I’m a never-put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket kinda girl.

I am so very thankful that this blog project seems to be helping me learn to rely more on God than on myself to do the providing.

Testing God 36 - Mysterious Ways

It is jokingly said of life on the racetrack that it is not a matter of IF you get hurt, but WHEN. It’s no joke—It’so Facto, as my father-in-law used to say.

It seems quite a sensible idea to me to ask God to take control over my life since I do a pretty good job of mucking things up, left to my own devices. I find the old adage that ‘God works in mysterious ways’ is proven true over and over again.

I remember listening to Mark and Tammy’s testimony at a lunch gathering one day shortly after we met.

Tammy was a Christian but never could get her husband, Mike, to make that commitment. So you could have knocked her over with a feather when her jockey husband came home late one afternoon, a day or two before his fatal accident. When questioned about his whereabouts, he told Tammy that he had an inexplicable urge to stop by a church, where after sitting quietly for awhile wondering why in the heck he had come there, he felt God’s presence for the very first time.

Tammy said that that gave her an enormous amount of comfort through the following weeks, and ultimately the courage to allow life support to be disconnected when the doctors told her that there was no hope.

For Mark Johnston, I believe his epiphany came a bit later when, because of the accident, his life was once again spinning out of control.

As Mark and Tammy and Jerry and I traveled far and wide to various racetracks that summer with Joe’s horses, we had ample time to get to know each other. We laughed and carried on and recounted funny stories from the track. But every once in awhile, the topics we discussed were of a serious nature.

Like all the life lessons we learned the hard way.

Daily Notes: And speaking of delayed harvests, the last potential reason for this listed in Rich Toward God by Dr. Hood is:

Depth—God may be preparing you for something no one can anticipate, and your willingness to stay tough and true could be part of the training process. When it comes to finances, Luke 16:11 records that Jesus once asked a very interesting question: “So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?” I wonder what Jesus was talking about when he talked about “true riches.” For the rich fool it would certainly have meant another opportunity to give. But, even beyond giving, what are the true riches? Surely they include answered prayer, the salvation of loved ones, receiving the peace that passes understanding, and so on. Please make your own list of riches that money can’t buy, and ask the Lord to help you focus on these priceless blessings.

In today's photo, Jerry and former jockey Jamie Bruin discuss something in the Form, while UB, expresses his disinterest in the conversation.