Cows Don’t Give Milk | Kyle McMurray Coaching, LLC

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My Granddad was a dairyman. That means that he had a huge farm and he milked cows for a living. These big tanker trucks would come on a daily basis and collect the raw milk from the stainless steel tanks he had and they would process it so that you could soak your Tony TigTiger flak for the morning Breakfast. He taught me a lot. He had little one liners that he would say that, over the years, have proven to me of what gems they are. I want to share one with you today.

You’re listening to Living the Freedom Life, this is episode 116 and today I’m sharing with you the fact that Cows Don’t Give Milk.

Have you ever heard the statement “It works if you work it”? Here is another one, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Well, how about this one, “Cows don’t give milk”. You see, all three of those can mean the same thing. The last one means a lot to me because of my Granddad sharing it with me while I was little, while we were in his Milk Barn.

I have learned this; The key to freedom, success and happiness is this: “Cows don’t give milk.”

People think that cows GIVE milk. That it’s automatic and free: We approach so many things in life that if “I wish, I ask…..then, I obtain.”

We look at everything in life through this lens more and more. Especially in Christianity. We’ll talk about that in a minute.

Back to my example…

The cows don’t give milk, you have to milk them. You have to get up at 4 in the morning, go to the field, call them up, walk through the corral full of manure, risk getting kicked, trampled, multiple times, haul the hay and feed inside and put it in the troughs, yes, there may be automatic milkers but you still have to put them on, maintain them, clean them for storage and clean the glass pipes the milk is pumped through to the stainless steel tanks.

You have to clean the entire barn, because, well, cows aren’t exactly the most clean of animals. Milk is white, it needs to be clean and pure. There are state inspections and federal regulations. Oh and besides, you are feeding them the best feed available for their milk production, so it’s not cheap. Maintaining their health and records. Not to mention bookkeeping, forecasting and herd management (that’s a big one). OH, and by the way, you’re not just doing this once a day, you have milk twice…every day. That means no holidays. It’s a lot of constant work. And I’m just hitting the highlights.

The reason I’m telling you this is because you have to do the work yourself. Even though there may be some things that are automatic, and to the outsider, just because one thing is called “automatic” that doesn’t negate the hundred other things going on in the background that have to get done. But you have to be the one doing the work. No one is going to do it for you. That brood cow doesn’t “give” you anything. Life doesn’t give you anything. You have to work for it.

We overlook this in so many areas of life.

I’m surprised at how many people take this approach to Coaching and Mental Health. Some people think that we just fix people. No. We come alongside our clients and show them, train them, and provide them safe pathways to do the work for themselves. This way, they know how to do it when they are no longer our clients. They can go…you guessed it, Live the Freedom Life.

Look, This applies to everything in life.

I’ll say it again. I have learned this; The key to freedom, success and happiness is realizing that: “Cows don’t give milk.”

Now, don’t go off context here. I am not saying that we have to work for our salvation. This is what the entire book of Galatians addresses. That work is done for us through the Cross of Jesus Christ. He has already paid for our sin, He died on that cross and He rose out of the grave to conquer death. We cannot work our way to Heaven. Even if we had a tower to get there. That is not what I’m saying here.

But we are responsible for receiving healing and accepting Him. We are responsible for carrying our cross. We are responsible for sacrificing ourselves, dying to our own desires. We are responsible for choosing to (well, first) study to show ourselves approved, to find out what Jesus did and how He lived His life, and we are responsible for choosing to follow His example. That’s what the term “working out your salvation” means. That’s the process of sanctification.

It takes work to get up and have some relationship building time with God. It takes applying yourself to not react, to stop in the middle of your emotions and it takes sacrificing you wanting to blast your reaction to the person in front of you. And it takes sacrificing time to remove yourself from a situation.

Yes, there are some automatic things that God has done for you, like I described in my Grandad’s automatic milkers. But those automatic milkers are a part of the work that my Grandad wasn’t responsible for. That was up to the technology of the milker manufacturer, to make it automatic. My grandad had the responsibility of all the other work that needed to be done. He made the daily sacrifices it took to get you your milk for breakfast.

That is the secret to Living the Freedom Life, the cow does not give milk. You milk her or you don’t get milk. What I am saying is that you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to do the work, and it’s not done in a day. It’s a part of life.

In fact we are just trying to get out of the result of what happened in the Garden of Eden. Remember? After the fall, God said “Adam, where are you?” He knew. Adam went into the blame game. “This woman You gave to me…” Right?

Well, you know the result of what happened. He caused Adam to work the soil and Eve to toil in childbirth. In other words, because of the separation from God that we caused by our sin, it will take work to get back there again. Now, a part of that is the work that Jesus has already done. We discussed that. But there is also a part of that work where we are responsible for it.

But life is not a matter of wishing or wanting, it’s a matter of working. So remember – “Cows don’t give milk. You have to work for it”