The Real Life Adventures of Emily Sinclair

Today is Bodie's seventeenth birthday. Wow, seventeen years of driving everyone crazy, escaping, causing trouble and making the world a much more fun place to live. He's a special horse, that Bodie is. I have worked with dozens of horses, ridden a wide range of breeds and I never, EVER, have met a horse like Bodie. He really doesn't act like a horse, he acts more like a large dog with the mind of a cat. He's the smartest horse I've ever met, too. I can recall one day when I was riding him and we watched my sister jump her horse. The next day I was riding him by the jump when he took off and ran for the jump to jump it! He'd seen Mia do it, so he thought he should be able to do it, too. In fact he copies a lot of what I do or what other horses do. That's how he learned to take the yellow handle for the hotwire in his mouth, he watched me do it and figured he wouldn't get shocked if he did that. >.< Overall, I'm so blessed to have Bodie in my li...

It started when I received a call from my Mom. I was out camping with my dad, sisters and brothers when Dad told me Mom had called and wanted to talk to me. "Mom?" "Emily, the neighbor called me." Silence. I knew something was wrong. "She can't keep Bodie anymore. Something's happened." It was like a bomb had gone off in my perfect life and nothing I did could fix it. In one phone call my dream about keeping Rylee at my neighbor's house was gone, vanished. My idea of working both horses whenever I wanted had been kicked out the door. My poor neighbor, it wasn't even her fault. She was in a crisis and all I could do was watch. Bodie was taken up to the barn I was part of, as my neighbor trusted my barn manager to take care of him for her. My instructor promised that she'd care for Bodie as long as she could, but my neighbor needed to decide what she wanted done with him come Spring. "We'll take care of him until Sprin...

"What if your blessing come through raindrops? What if your healing comes through tears? What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You're near. What if the trials of this life, are your mercies in disguise." -Laura Story That's a song I love that's gotten me through some hard times. Times that I shudder to think about repeating again, but that have shaped me in this last year more than I can even begin to account for. I've always felt like I was a pretty Godly young woman. I prayed, I read my Bible pretty often, I wasn't rebellious or mean. I looked good on the outside. But since late August God has been shaping me into something new, something more beautiful. The refiner's fire hurts really bad, but the outcome is so worth it. I feel like I've come closer to him as I faced these trials, as I watched others dragged through the dirt in such awful ways I can't even begin to understand why. I've seen people wreck their...