Making a living milking cows was — and still is — just about impossible. We had no land, no equipment, almost no money, and absolutely no experience. What we did have was a team of draft horses and a man who saw the entire endeavor as a spiritual exercise.
For Dennis, milking cows wasn’t a business plan. It was a test of faith, a living prayer, a way of walking straight into the unknown with nothing but trust. He wrote about it at the time, and his words say everything:
“When we bought the cows (which was my wife’s idea), everyone we knew agreed we had no chance of making it work. I looked at the endeavor as a spiritual experience right from the start. Getting the money to buy the cows, finding and setting up a barn to move them to, hauling away the manure with just a young green pair of horses, and feeding them with no land and no equipment was all one miracle after another for me.”
That was the world I grew up in — not a world of stability or logic, but a world where miracles were expected, where the impossible was simply the next thing God would handle.
For a year we milked the thirty or so cows we had bought and lived off the sale of the milk. Then one day the man who owned the barn we were renting decided he wanted to quit his job and milk cows himself. He figured if “idiots like us” could make it, he’d have no trouble at all. He wanted us out immediately.
Dennis didn’t panic. He didn’t argue. He simply said to my mother, “We have to wait for God to come into the barn.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
Things got tense. The owner wanted us gone. The cows needed a place to go. We had no backup plan, no money, no land, and no options. But Dennis told a friend to watch closely because he was “going to pass a herd of cows through the eye of a needle.”
And then — in the way these things always seemed to happen around him — God walked into the barn in the form of a cattle dealer. The man moved our entire herd to a third barn fifty miles away, just like that.
After we landed on the new farm, a man I’d never seen before walked up and told Dennis he was taking back his mower. Dennis didn’t flinch. He didn’t negotiate. He simply said:
“At this point in my life, I don’t think anyone has the power to take away anything I really need.”
The man never took the mower.
That was Dennis. That was my guru. He didn’t teach through lectures or rituals. He taught through the way he lived — through the way he trusted, the way he stood still in the middle of chaos, the way he expected the universe to rise up and meet him.
Growing up in that atmosphere shaped me more than any sermon ever could. I learned that faith wasn’t an idea. It was a way of walking. A way of seeing. A way of surrendering to something larger than fear.
And that is how my spiritual journey began: in barns we didn’t own, with cows we shouldn’t have been able to keep, following a man who believed that God could move a herd through the eye of a needle.
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