Christmas 2020 came, and we were able to play host to our entire family just days after we moved in. But despite the joy that the holiday season can bring, getting to that point wasn’t all that blissful.

Because we owned two houses for a matter of ten days until we closed on the sale of our starter home, we were able to slowly move small items from one house to the other during that time. After several treks across town in our personal vehicles during that timespan, in addition to the non-stop wall painting I had done in almost every room prior to the big furniture move, I was just kind of over it. I was exhausted. I was ready to be moved in.

And on the day of the big move, with the truck ready to go, the sky opened and poured rain on us for most of it. I didn’t think this was funny, and I told God exactly that. It kept raining.

I don’t know why it had to rain on moving day. It just seems to be the way of things for us. Almost every time we’ve moved, whether for college, moving out of state, or just across town, God has always seen fit to open the heavens and give us this particular opportunity for growth. I can look at it now with a better perspective, but I was less than thrilled in the moment.

After dark, when everything was finally unloaded, the movers and our family members were ready to pack it in and head home for a much-deserved rest. However, I had one last request, and I’ll probably owe my brother-in-law (and the rest of them) forever for the physical exhaustion this endeavor inflicted. I don’t know that I owe anything to the movers, because I paid them extra to stay and help with this next part.

We had to move the chicken coop.

It easily weighed half a ton, and I had no idea how we were physically going to do it, but it had to go to the new house. First, the new owner of our starter home didn’t want a coop in her backyard. Second, the chickens needed a place to live at the new house. There wasn’t time to build another coop right then (and lumber wasn’t cheap in 2020). In addition to that, all eighteen chickens were currently taking up residence in an extra large dog crate in the garage, a less than ideal situation for my chickens. The coop had to move.

My poor chickens were stressed and agitated from the ordeal, which made me stressed and agitated as well. Who are we kidding? I was stressed and agitated anyway. The chickens needed their coop, their place of safety, the only home their sweet little brains could remember, and I was determined to give it to them. And I can relate. I was done with this move, and I wanted a house, too.

So the chicken coop (and the chicken run) had to go into that moving truck, come hell or high water, and the water, we already had.

It took eight grown adults to get that chicken coop moved from one house to the other, and I still don’t know how we had the collective strength to do it. In the dark. In the rain. Down a steep moving truck ramp. God saw us. He was always there. Even in my internal ranting and bad attitude. And I know some of it wasn’t internal, either. I’m thankful God is patient.

Fortunately, the coop took only a small amount of damage in transit, in that a couple of the wooden stilts we originally built as supports broke free from the bottom of the coop. Somehow, the rest of it remained intact.

The location of the chicken coop in the yard today is as far as we had the strength to carry it, and it remains unparallel to the pasture fence even now. It’s just a little crooked, and given that the weight of the coop could have crushed any one of us, I’m just thankful that no one was hurt, the chickens had a place to live, and that their needs were met.

At that point we sent everyone home, with the exception of my mom and sister, who stayed with the kids, because Hubby, my brother-in-law, and I still had to go back for one more trip. We had to get the chicken run.

The original plan was to simply walk the chicken run straight into the truck and drive away. It should have been easy, but it wasn’t going to happen that way. I had rented a truck that was long enough, but not tall enough. I’m not even sure a taller truck existed. My heart sank. This was about to get so much harder. “Why can’t this just be easy, God? I want my house. I want to sleep. I need to rest.”

Shaking off the irritation for the moment, we made a new plan. We had to dismantle the chicken run if we were ever going to get it to its destination.

I am thankful for the men in my life who carry multi-tools and pocket knives everywhere they go, because we had just moved everything out of this place. The last thing to go was this chicken run, and we didn’t have much in the way of resources where we were standing at the time. It’s always good to have a multi-tool on hand, I’ve learned.

We cut the chicken wire covering the run all the way down the length of it, disassembled all the locking metal pieces, and then inverted and sandwiched the two pieces together. Again, in the dark, and in the rain.

It sounds simple, this chicken run is seven feet tall, nine feet wide, and twenty feet long. It’s not heavy, but it is awkward and large. And at this point, we also had to contend with all the sharp metal of the chicken wire sticking out in every direction. We had rented the largest truck available to us – the largest truck in the fleet – and it didn’t feel like it would be enough. I just wanted to give up and go to sleep at that point. In fact, I wanted to give up on farm life before we’d even begun. The longer we were there, the weaker my resolve that this had been a good idea, at least on the inside. Maybe not as on the inside as my attitude conveyed, but I digress.

I’m blessed to have such wonderful people in my life, who go along with all my ideas, and my stubbornness, and my tears, because lesser men would have called it quits and told me to just buy another chicken run. My husband’s love and how he quietly stands beside in support is something for which I will always be grateful. I don’t know anyone else who would be willing to take this journey with me.

And we did eventually get that chicken run to the new house.

In the light of the next day, we put the chicken run back together, using zip ties and ingenuity, getting poked and stabbed by the chicken wire the whole time. Once something like chicken wire has been stretched tight to cover a certain set of dimensions, cutting it, and then trying to put it back together again is more of a challenge.

The chicken coop and run remind me of myself. I’ve often been, and felt, battered by the bumps of my journey, fallen, broken, ripped in two, stretched beyond what I thought I could bear, with sharp edges that hurt others. Grief is ugly.

I know I looked really ugly on this leg of the journey; I was in a state of grief. I didn’t fully understand it, and I had done my darndest to push it down and away from me – anything to push the feelings of rejection and abandonment as far from me as I possibly could. It does explain my attitude, even if it doesn’t excuse it.

It would take several more months and trials on the farm before I realized just what I was running from – and that I was utterly broken, holding myself together with zip ties and distractions. God had drawn me into this farm life not just to teach me how to milk a goat or make soap, or to drop buckets of rain on me during the move, but to free my soul from the bondage of a lifetime of emotional abuse handed down by an earthly father whom I thought loved me. But that revelation was months from now.

We still have this battered, stitched-together chicken coop and run today. It stands as a sort of emblem to me. It’s not the same now that it was when we purchased it new. The coop sits on a base of cinder blocks, and it’s a little closer to the ground than it was in the beginning. It’s not as pretty as it was the day we finished the original build on it. But they’re both still standing, and they still serve their purposes. The chickens don’t know, and they don’t care. They’re just happy to have a safe place to live, to have shelter from the elements. It suits them just fine.

And that’s the “why” for the difficult move in the rain. The reason for the broken chicken coop, and the cut-in-half chicken run that was too big for the truck, was so I could see that God is near to the broken-hearted.

God can still take broken things and make them whole again. He can still heal hearts that are ripped in two. He can handle my sharp edges. He can handle my spiritual tantrums. He’s God; He’s big enough. He’s patient enough. He’s loving enough. He is enough.

I didn’t fully understand all of that at the time, but as I look outside my window at that coop, it serves as a memorial to me always that God is in the business of healing the broken.