Love is For the Ones Who Love the Work
What An Old Camp Horse Taught Me About the Work of God
By Emily Mundell
It was the summer of 2005. I was a shy eight year old girl attending my first overnight weekend at a little Christian camp by the name of Camp Little Red. I had been horse crazy for a few years (ever since watching the animated movie Spirit) and I already knew the highlight of my week was going to be the two or so hours of horse time I was going to have over the four days. I was nervous about sleeping away, nervous about hanging out with strangers, but I was fairly vibrating with anticipation for getting to be in the barn and ride.
Unsurprisingly enough, little me was completely correct. I have only one other really solid memory from that camp (the silly hour I joined, if anyone is curious), and the rest of what I can remember from that weekend is solely the horse program, or, more specifically, one horse. Sir.
Sir was “my horse” for the two-ish hours of barn time I had at that camp. He was a little pinto gelding, not especially remarkable looking, not fancy. And yet, he made a permanent impression on my little self, more permanent than I could ever realize at the time, and I delighted in him. Without the awareness to express it then, I basked in his warmth and kindness, the way he took care of scared, shy, little me.
I do not remember my counselor from that 2005 camp weekend long ago. I do not remember the speaker or their messages. I don’t remember any of my tent mates, or the food we ate, or any games we played. But what I do remember, is that little pinto horse.
Fast forward some nineteen years to 2024, to a warm, mid-February afternoon, and I am kneeling at Sir’s side in the wet snow for the very last moments of his life. I am thanking him between full sobs for the love and service and beauty he had provided to me and hundreds of others as a camp horse. I am thinking of the past winter weeks that I had been coming regularly to give him a daily, delicious soaked meal in his golden years. Thinking of how I had gently trimmed his hooves, tenderly placed a little saddle with the smallest children on his back. How I had carefully clipped his winter coat in the spring when it was not shedding properly like it used to, taking extra moments to slip him a treat, or scratch his neck.
I was overcome with nineteen years of memories, from that little horse crazy girl into the young woman who had worked hard to be the one responsible for him and his friends, who daily strived to learn and improve and educate myself in horses in order to do right by them. Tearfully, I reckoned with how the care that he had once tenderly given to little me had in these years become my tender care for him in return. How amazing and beautiful and how hard it was to sit there and feel that and be a witness to it all. To be the privileged one to walk him through that final door.
Love is for the ones who love the work.
A lot can happen in nineteen years. For me, I stuck around at that camp. When I turned fifteen, I came to work as a junior wrangler in the barn, summer of 2012, Sir still a fixture. And I kept coming back. I became a senior wrangler, a counselor-in-training, a counselor. I got to know and married my husband of nearly eight years. I became an adult. I went through various shifts in perspective, theology, horsemanship, etc. I published books, started small freelance careers, and finally, in 2020, I became the head wrangler of the horse program, which I have led for the past five years, with Sir by my side for almost all of it.
There is a sort of unique perspective that comes when you spend so long in the same place, particularly a place of ministry, where lives are regularly being transformed and changed. Even without the strictly spiritual aspect, you get to have a perhaps small, but intimate, window into many different lives of both campers and staff. I have seen the older staff who counseled me and the staff who were my peers grow up, get married (sometimes to each other), move to other continents, become parents, start thriving careers, and develop their own ministries. I have seen the kids I counseled as little day campers grow up to be staff in their own right, go on to graduate, and even get married. People I have known and worked with through camp have passed away, become sick, slipped out of contact, turned gray, and on and on.
While I don’t want to make this little essay an advertisement for camp ministry, I have found it to be the aspect of my life in which the Church (capital C) is made most apparent and visible. The day-to-day of camp notwithstanding, getting older in such a place allows you to see yourself as one piece in a greater whole, to see your part, your life, as a thread in the tapestry of Life that God is weaving. I become more and more aware that I am standing on the shoulders of so many who came before me, that I have linked arms with so many who walk alongside me, that I am paving the path for those that will come after.
My life has been touched and changed by hundreds and hundreds of others, and my life will do the same for others still. This didn't happen with grand gestures or world-shaking events. It happened slowly and steadily, through day-to-day moments and ordinary life. It happened because there was a Work to be done: outhouses to clean, pancakes to make, songs to be sung, floors to be mopped, poop to clean off the shower floor (yes, that really did happen), a scavenger hunt to win, a Bible verse to be found, a homesick kid who needed comforting, puke to rinse from bedsheets, laughter to share with a fellow counselor, dishes to do, an encouraging note to be written, a craft to make, a child to pony around horseback in the hot sun, a river to wade in together.
The transformation we experience is not and cannot be a solo act. It is a group project. A team effort. It is the Great Work we are all taking part in, little by little, day by day.
It is becoming truly real to me that the year-round effort of my work, which is the horse program (involving, amongst other things, the trimming of hooves, the daily checks, the diet management, the buying and selling, the training, the finding and training of wrangling staff, the vet appointments, the losses, the stresses) are all just acts of daily faithfulness, a making of space for people to come spend a week and see who God is. To meet Him, to know Him.
Love is for the ones who love the work.
Friends, THIS is the work we are to love. The slow and painful work that requires a daily faithfulness, a willingness to have daily faithfulness expected of us. So much of life is simply “the work,” in whatever capacity it has been given to each of us.
Perhaps for you it isn’t fourteen years of summer camp ministry. Maybe it’s the work of shepherding little lives into the fullness of adulthood.
Maybe it’s a daily job at a 9-5, smiling at customers and offering up your time in service.
It might be a creative project that tugs at your soul, that requires you to push yourself beyond what you thought possible.
It could be that you have parents, siblings, friends, a spouse, or others who need regular, intensive support that saps your strength and dries up your energy like water in the desert.
Often, we are tempted to bemoan or belittle these acts of daily faithfulness. Often they feel so small, so useless in the grand scheme of the wide world. After all, what are your efforts in the face of systemic forces? Of great evils and injustices? What is the point of one life, swimming against the current of such furious noise?
Were we to stop, would it really matter in the end?
Would it make any difference if we were to shake ourselves free of our obligations and responsibilities, shrugging them off like too-big coats from our mother’s closet, like our father’s shoes that swallow our small, child feet? If we wanted release from the bonds of daily faithfulness? Of our work that seems just to go on and on?
But, dear friend, what are we trying to be free of?
The living? The miraculous task of it? The very stitches that make up the fabric of our lives, of us? The very passions etched into our young and wild hearts? That which brings us into deeper unity with those closest to us, to those who need what we have to give? Each ordinarily divine moment that builds a life, a community, brick by brick?
Beloved, you must know this, when you are tempted to quit, when you are weary beyond all measure. When you no longer feel joy in the process, but can only fix your eyes on a distant, someday result.
Love is for the ones who love the work.
A little pinto horse named Sir lived and died quietly and unremarkably at an obscure kids camp. He never won ribbons or money or trophies. All he did is what any of us can do: show up, live faithfully, and love our work, the work that God has given us to do.
And his impact? It was eternal. I know this, because it changed me. I know this, because it changed others. I know this, because change has a ripple effect that keeps spreading out and out and on and on. The transformation in my life will transform others, and they, in their turn, will transform more. That is how change really does happen. That is God, in us. That is how He accomplishes His Good Work.
Because Love is for the ones who love the work.
“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” — 1st Corinthians 15:58
Love cannot remain by itself - it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action and that action is service. - Mother Teresa
EMILY MUNDELL is an indie author fitfully existing somewhere in her 20's. Her heart is drawn to fantasy and speculative fiction stories with deep dives into the human experience.
When not creating or consuming stories, Emily can probably be found hard at work with one of her equine-related day jobs, building core memories with family and friends, or diving into nerdy conversations on the nervous system, theology, media literacy, or Hobbit family trees. She lives in rural Canada with her husband, dog, and small horse herd.
Connect with her on Instagram, buy her books, or book a photography session.
