Yesterday I received a call at work from my daughter, "Mom, Grumpy is missing." Grumpy is a Brown African Goose. She came to live with us on a ruse one day when my husband and 2 daughters went to pick up hay. After loading the flatbed trailer with the hay, the two girls noted two geese in the field. The farmer commented that they had just showed up and then, as an aside, stated, "If you can catch 'em, you can have 'em."
The chase was on. The girls pursued those geese back and forth through the muddy field. Honking escalated and the two men stood back and laughed until they cried as they watched the girls get covered in the muck, while the two geese continued to be golden. It became evident that sheer chase alone would not result in a victory, and I really don't know if the two men actually thought those girls were even capable of pulling it off at all. The girls wised up, and realized they needed to "work smarter, not harder." They focused in on a strategy; the woven wire fence lines. They decided to use them like a cowboy uses a box canyon to catch wild horses; working them up and in until they simply have no place to go except into the arms of the pursuer.
And it worked. They caught the geese. The men stood laughing and looking at each other, shaking their heads. My husband was left wondering how to get them home? He decided to just put them in the back seat of the truck with the girls. He later stated that was the worst mess he had ever cleaned out of a truck.
Based on their demeanor and apparent temperament, the girls named the two geese Happy and Grumpy. A few short months after they arrived, Happy passed away in tragic encounter with one of our dogs. The girls mourned Happy. My youngest made a headstone for her out of a concrete paver from our yard. A friend from down the road had some geese that he said we were also welcome to have.... if we could catch them. The girls made quick work of it this time and knowledge acquired from our neighbor about a cleaner method of transport made for less work on the tail end for my husband.
The next spring, Gumpy started laying eggs. The girls waited and watched, but nothing. She wasn't really "broody;" showing an interested in staying in her nest and sitting on those eggs. It wasn't until the next spring when Grumpy again began to lay that she also began to sit for long hours on that nest. It seemed to take forever, but within about a months time, 4 goslings were hatched on a rainy Arkansas day. We declared it "The Perfect Day for the birth of Webbed Feet" and spent hours watching and laughing over the antics of both the goslings and the adult geese who now seemed to share sentinel duty over them. They were quite the effective little family unit.
So on this particular day, when my daughter sounded so grief laden I gave her the words that every mother gives, "It'll be ok, honey. I saw her this morning, she can't be far. Perhaps she'll be home by this evening." But as the girls and dad went on walk-about that day, they discovered a frenzied feather coated scene, and some evidence of coyotes which led them to believe with more certainty that she was gone for good, leaving the goslings that much less protected from the same predators. Grumpy was always in the lead to charge any perceived threat to her goslings, so I sadly reconstructed the logic of how her loss would have come to be; the mother dying in the protection of her young.
That evening during our prayer time both girls thanked God for the time they had Grumpy, for the goslings He blessed us with through her, for the memories made. Their sweet prayers brought tears to my eyes and I was reminded of Job's response, "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." My responses tend to be more along the lines of Jonah's responses to the loss of his plant; more of a "Lord, how could you!?" approach. But my heart was blessed to hear tranquility from the hearts of my daughters. Affirmation of God's faithfulness, even in the face of loss.
The next morning, cup of coffee in hand, I stepped onto the front porch to breath in the new day and survey the scene of our front yard that lays across the bottoms of a somewhat narrow Ozarks holler. I anxiously glanced around to do a head check, wondering if any more had been lost overnight. Due to our location in the woods, we have always feared that if our small flock was discovered as a food source, it wouldn't be long before they would clean us out. I started with looking for the large white-ish bodies of the adults. 1, 2, 3, then moved on to the yellow-ish of the... wait. 3?! Did I just count THREE?! I demanded a recount (and mentally checked... did I put in my contacts this morning?) then adjusted my view from the porch to better see around some of the hickory trees in the yard. Yes! Three geese in the yard! Grumpy had returned! She looked pretty rough, shell-shocked of sorts, but she was here and her goslings were merrily pecking the ground and making their little whistles all around her. She hobbled a bit as she moved to the water to drink, but she had indeed made it home!! I woke the girls and told them Grumpy was home; they raced to the front porch like it was Christmas morning.
In the first chapter of the book of Job, he concludes "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." At the end of the book in chapter 42 Job states, "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you." Unlike myself, the girls never lost faith. I pray their young faith has even been strengthened through this experience as my adult faith is simply challenged by one of life's greatest mysteries; the faith of a child.
In the Valley He Restores My Soul
