The Rains Came Down

It's been a couple of weeks since our land flooded worse than I have ever seen before. 

 

We have lived at this home for over four years, we have never seen weather like this, nor flooding like this.  Sadly, we weren't prepared for such, and we were given a hard lesson in homestead life. 

 

 

The rains came so fast on top of the weeks of rain we already had.  We woke up early that morning, and when I looked outside, I saw just how high the waters were.  John rushed out in his jammies to discover that our male baby goat was missing.  :( He walked all through knee high water, but the goat was no where to be found.  The other goats faired better, but our barn had been flooded, so we had to release them into the garden that was fenced off. 

 

My favorite goat, our only lamancha, was sick though.  We tried to save her, but she died the following day.  When the water went down, we also discovered her baby had drowned.

 

 

Poor Lily, she lost her mom and her brother.  She mourned, I mourned, we all were heartbroken.  It was apparent that our goat barn was in a bad place, but we do not have the time or finances to just build a new one right now.  We decided to try to find a larger farm for them to go to, and thankfully, we were able to send the remaining four to the same farm. 

 

 

We had to say goodbye.  It was the best that we could do given the busy-ness of our adoption on top of all that we have going on right now.  It wouldn't have been fair to let the rest chance bad weather or their health declining.  We researched goats extensively, and we thought we had done everything right before we purchased them, but we had never seen weather like we've had this past year.  It was a hard decision, I rejoiced with these babies, and I loved these gals.  Goats have the greatest personalities, and our goats were so affectionate, Sierra was the smartest farm animal I had ever seen.  I can't believe she died.  I held her head in my lap, she couldn't stand, she just nuzzled me and bleated pitifully.  They will be missed greatly, it's been a week, and I still find myself looking out the window to see what the goats are up to, even though they are gone.

 

You can't really prepare for the impact of life's storms.  It is possible to prepare for the grief that they can bring by securing a good foundation in God, lean on Him in times of good and in times of bad.  The loss of our goats hit us emotionally and financially, we never could have guessed that the storms would get that bad, but when they did, I'm so thankful that we were able to handle it with a calm strength and reassurance from God.