With support from local law enforcement Jerry goes out and seizes horses that have been neglected and abused. The sights are heartbreaking. Ribs showing through raw and emaciated skin is all he has to work with on some horses. Jerry spends a lot of money (he gets donations and volunteers from all over the world to work with him) and many hours stretching into days and weeks trying to rehabilitate a suffering and dying horse. He and his volunteers will take shifts staying with such horses around the clock--applying medications, wrapping wounds, feeding small portions of a special diet. Some horses expected not to make it end up making miracle-like recoveries. Others do not. But in every case Jerry believes that love can make an amazing difference.

Jerry knows there are people who think he's crazy for spending so much money on such animals. His reply? "If you love horses, no explanation is needed. You understand. If you don't love horses, no explanation will do. You'll never understand." Jerry believes that you never explain someone into love. They either have it or they don't. Love is irreducible and unexplainable.

Without knowing it, Jerry is being very biblical in his understanding of love. Love knows no price as being too high. Love is extravagant and reckless. I think of Mary pouring highly expensive perfume on the feet of Jesus. Judas thought it was a waste. But Mary thought nothing of it. When God so loved the world, he gave his most precious Son to do what was necessary to save that world.

But Jerry is also being biblical in the fact that in Scripture love is never explained. It's revealed, shown, and lived, but not explained. When you come up against love you come up against the unexplainable mystery of the universe, but you also come up against what can look like the greatest foolishness of the universe. In Deuteronomy 7:7 God tells Israel that there was no reason why he chose them as his own: not BECAUSE of anything explainable or understandable—not their numbers or size for they were the fewest and smallest. It was simply because he loved them. But don't dare ask why he loved them. No answer. To the question, "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" (Psalm 8:4) you see no answer. God chose his elect from before the foundation of the world by setting his love on them. Don't dare ask why or you will hear a deafening silence in return. You either believe that or you don't. God may do a lot of explaining in the life to come of the hows and whys of a lot of events. But the one thing I believe he will never explain is his love. It just is. You either believe that and have thereby experienced its power to save through the death of his Son or you don't. Horse lovers just know what causes Jerry to sacrifice everything to save horses. To people who don't love horses, what Jerry does is foolishness, just as the cross is foolishness to those who don't believe.

I understand why Jerry does what he does. Not in any abstract sense of logical formulas that can be explained, but on an unexplainable level of understanding that just is. I LOVE horses. Why? Don't ask. I can't explain it. You either love horses too and know what I mean or you don't.

Right now I'm having something of a "Jerry experience". I'm taking extraordinary measures to nurse and care for a dog dying of cancer, trying to give him the best quality of life that I can in his remaining time here. Dog lovers understand without my saying a word. We connect on the level of the heart. But I can tell that people who don't love dogs are baffled and will never understand. Nor do I try to explain it to them. To try to do so would presuppose that it's a matter of the mind when it's really an orientation of the heart, the same as God's love for us.

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