The Army Mule is making a comeback, so is its Marine brother.  It seems nothing our military industrial complex has developed is better at moving supplies through the mountains of Afghanistan than a mule.  And so, more than 50 years after the last Army Mules, Trotter (583R) and Hambone (9YLL) were deactivated, soldiers in Hawthorne, Nevada, and marines in Bridgeport, California are learning how to pack and drive mules in mountain terrain.  George Washington was the first American general to advocate the use of mules.  The best mules to be found in America at the end of the eighteenth century were from Mount Vernon, being sired by an Andalusian donkey named Royal Gift, which was, indeed, a present from the King of Spain.

            Mules have so much to offer as draft animals.  They cooperate better than donkeys, and spook less than horses.  They eat comparatively little.  They are surer footed than horses, and sturdier boned.  Mule fanciers have long argued that mules are more intelligent than either donkeys or horses, and recent studies suggest that they indeed excel either of their equine competitors at the tasks we need them to do.  A mule, unlike a horse, will not eat till it founders.  Horses will run, or work until they are dead, but mules will only work to exhaustion (hence the image of the “stubborn” mule which won’t move another step).

            Well into the last century mules did every sort of farm work on most of our farms, and served our military in every corner of the globe.  In rough terrain they are a force multiplier of 3, tripling what troops without mules can do.  Although our military has just begun to reactivate mules, the CIA provided them to the Mujahideen throughout the 1980’s – more than 1200 - purchased from breeders in Tennessee.  They were flown to Islamabad, trucked to Peshawar where local drovers would take them across the Afghanistan border.  The mule also has its advocate as mount.  Although not nearly as fast as a horse, the mule eats less and is sturdier.  Kit Carson, who logged more miles traversing the American west than anyone, always preferred the mule.  Riders who are older or are recovering from surgery are finding what a gentler mount a mule is than a horse.

            Theologically, this information delights me immensely.  Again we find that there is nothing we can manufacture that improves upon what God has done, I think to myself.  But then I remember that mules are a hybrid.  We breed them, they rarely ever occur naturally.  Technically, a mule is a critter which has a donkey for a dad and a horse for a mom.  The critter produced when you switch that around is not a mule, but a “hinny”, and hinnies, for some reason, are not nearly so valuable as mules.  Humans learned all this, and learned all this thousands of years ago.  Absalom rode a mule into combat (II Samuel 18.9).  God made horses, God made donkeys.  Humans managed their breeding and produced mules.

            I was watching the Westminster Dog Show the other night and was again reminded of the variety of tasks we have bred dogs to do – and to do better than we ever could ourselves.  God made dogs, and we bred some to track, some to herd, some to haul, some to detect bombs, some to detect seizures, and some to find survivors beneath the rubble.

            “God planted a garden,” we are told in Genesis 2.8, “and in it he placed the man he had formed.”  The image provided by the artists and illustrators over the years is filled with pristine waterfalls and clusters of grapes always ripe and within reach.  But let us not forget that even in the garden we were given the tasks of farming and animal husbandry (Genesis 2.15, 1.28).  I hope you don’t think it a stretch to say that mules have a lot to teach us about God and us, and the way he blesses.  Yes, “every good and perfect gift comes from above,” (James 1.17).  But once we receive that blessing we are responsible for our use of it.  Isn’t that the lesson of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25.14-30)?  A blessing, then, is not so much a gift wrapped in ribbon, but abundant raw material.  God provides the fully stocked kitchen, pantry, and larder. We make the cake.

                        Through the strength that God provides.

Sources: “Riding High” by Susan Orlean in  The New Yorker (Feb. 15&22, 2010)

All Cloudless Glory: the Life of George Washington, Vol. II, by Harrison Clark

A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, and the Claiming of the American West,

            By Harrison Clark.