It reminds me of the phrase that God doesn’t call the equipped. He equips the called. God didn’t care how much my family or I knew about farming or goats, but he kept the phrase that he gave my Christian friend from Virginia on my mind. “What are you going to do with this?” For the first few months, we mowed…and mowed…and mowed. All in all, we mowed about 8-9 acres every week 3 seasons of the year. My family and I mowed about 4 hours each on a tractor mower and a zero-turn mower. The good news is that my wife and I found that mowing for the first two years was cathartic. We were just out in God’s country and the mowing did not seem like work. It was a fun journey learning how to take care of the property, but I’m sure we were plucky comic relief for anyone watching us. For starters, we had bought a tractor with a mower and brush hog. To tame the land, I attached the brush hog and went to my first overgrown field of about an acre. I remember feeling empowered on my first lap going through brush higher than me sitting on a tractor. However, I turned around and saw very little actual cutting going on and thought this was a crappy brush hog…only to find that the drive shaft had come off the tractor and I had done a great job of packing mud and dirt into the drive shaft of the brush hog. After I cleaned it, regreased it, and attached it correctly this time, the brush hog was a great tool and I went to clear out 3-4 acres. The next week I shifted to the mower and had another comic relief moment for my neighbors. On one of the fields by the main road that I had brush hogged, I was now using the mower to cut and “mulch” the new and old grass. My ensemble entailed a cowboy hat, cowboy work boots, jeans, and a Hawaiian shirt. I was enjoying my time taking care of the land. It was then I notice a car driving by and slowing down, so of course I waved. They sped back up and left me to my work. I thought it was odd, until I turned around to check my mowing. The large rows of grass from the brush hog were not going into the mower as I drove over them. Instead, I was “bailing hay” with my mower. The grass clumped up in front of the mower and was accumulating to the point where I had a no kidding clump of grass that was higher than my tractor tires. Naturally I felt silly and had to remove the “hay bale” to continue mowing, but it was on those days, we would daydream about what does God want us to do with this. We tried bee keeping for almost 2 years. We set up 2 hives and bought some local bees to populate the hives and actually managed to have 2 full colonies of prosperous bees. Unfortunately, my wife and I gradually turned from bee keepers to “bee havers”…meaning we didn’t go check on the bees enough or something, because we came out before the second winter to make sure if we needed to set up feeding to find both hives destroyed by wax moths. So, bees were not the calling. The inspiration came from the commercials for Heffer Project that provided dairy animals to people in poverty as a way to both feed them and give them an economic way out of poverty. After talking with the family and doing a lot of praying, the notion of being a dairy goat supplier for people was revealed to me as the calling, but I didn’t want to get into raising goats. I know nothing about this. The next few weeks we searched the internet for information about how to raise dairy goats and the whole family got into it. Durell’s parents, who also felt God’s calling and sold their house in Seattle to settle in on the family compound, also got into the dairy goat internet craze. Even Papa learned how to milk by watching YouTube videos. We were looking at fencing in a couple of pastures but hadn’t pulled the trigger and built actually fencing. Raising goats seemed like a lot of work and I wasn’t feeling sure if this is what we were supposed to do. Around June 2021, I decided we were not doing goats for this season because it just wasn’t working right. Once God tells you to do something and you say “no”, He generally puts something in front of us that is an offer we cannot refuse. In late June 2021, we got a message that an elderly couple with dwarf Nigerian dairy goats were getting out of the business to travel and see family. These were precisely the types of goats we had settled on as our starting breed. This was also a good way to get goats, because you aren’t getting someone’s trouble animals that usually go to auction and this beginning herd was 3 males and 5 females dwarf Nigerian dairy goats. We went to see the goats and immediately fell in love with these particular animals. The final nail in the ‘deal coffin’ was the sellers were willing to throw everything they had into the deal for all of their animals in one purchase. This included 3 metal and fiberglass houses, a couple of climbing play toys like an old john boat and concrete culvert, two 80-gallon water troughs, all the remaining feed in its container, and feeding troughs. I told them that I didn’t yet have a trailer to haul this all, but they offered to let me use one of their trailers and follow us with their truck and trailer to take the second load. This saved us at least $2000-$3000 for not having to buy a trailer yet. I felt like God was saying “raise goats now and stop procrastinating.” All of the adult goats were named by the previous owners, and we kept their names. Chatty was the herd mare and all black. Bubba looked to be part pigmy and was the herd buck. Chatty and Bubba had just made a baby girl and baby boy. The doe had a black and white face and looked like Flower from the Bambi movie. Naturally we named her Flower and her brother, who was solid tan, got the name Thumper. Next, we had an all-white, blue-eyed, natural polled male that was named Blue and twin dark brown goats rounded out the herd. Originally, we thought the brown goats, named Joy and Bar-B-Q were a female and a male, but later we found out that “Barbi” was indeed a girl. Now part of the reason I had said we weren’t going to raise goats is that we didn’t have any pastures fenced in. The only reason I could agree to buy these goats on the too good to be true offer is another God timing coincidence or divine intervention. My brother was living in Georgia working for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs hospital but said the good Lord was telling him to move to the Northwest Arkansas area. The local Arkansas VA hospital had just created a position that was what my brother was doing in Georgia. He sold his house and came to live with us temporarily while he looked for a house. He had 4 dogs and we needed them to have temporary shelter. It so happened that we had the barn and a pole barn that were close to each other. My brother bought temporary chain link pens that we connected the two barns and the yard between them. This gave his dogs shelter inside the barn and outside space to play. When we decided to buy the goats, my brother had taken a temporary assignment outside of the area and his dogs were either with him or in a shelter, because he couldn’t take all four. This left the temporary dog pen available for our brand new 8 dairy goats. However, now the fencing delay and long-term plans had to get back on track. I went to tractor store and bought an auger for the tractor and started digging holes as best we could. First thing we encountered was the reason for the name of our road address: Rock Haven Lane. I think we have every rock in the state of Arkansas in our pasture area. The auger helped but early in the process I hear a snap and the auger stopped turning. The tractor and drive shaft were still turning, but not the auger. Here I think I have broken the brand new and not cheap auger that is going to stop my fencing work. But apparently a shear pin is a thing. This is another simple life lesson that makes me shake my head at what I don’t know what I’m doing. We fix the shear pin and get back to digging. Despite several rain delays, we were making progress, but I began to get extremely tired. After all, it was digging in the summer heat, throwing a 16lbs bar at rocks to bust them out of the holes, and manually driving in T-posts. As a retired Marine, if you are tired, then you are out of shape. Therefore, the answer is to push harder and do more work. It got to the point where I couldn’t use the T-post hammer but 3 times before I couldn’t breathe or lift it. I knew something was wrong when my daughter was able to make me get into the truck while I was trying to resist. Went to the doctor and they said that my blood count was low. In fact, it was so low, they recommended I go to the emergency room and see if they would give me a transfusion. I relented and went to the ER. In the waiting room, I start researching low blood counts online. Apparently, the low end of normal was 14. Emergency needing transfusion is below 7, and death can occur at 5. I was just above 6. This put a delay in my fencing plans as over the next several months, I had transfusions, tests, scans, and surgeries to find the leaking blood spots. We could not afford to rest despite being out of blood. I now had goats that needed me to get a pasture fenced. I looked for estimates to convert an old 300’ chicken house into a goat barn and labor to put in my pasture fencing. Both estimates were in the multiple thousands of dollars that we could not afford. We turned to the internet for help. There were many self help and beginning goat people that had suggestions for using pallets as foundational building materials. My wife and I were able to locate enough free pallets to wall off each end of the chicken house. One side for boys and one side for girls. Then we made pallet pens on the girls side for expected birthing pens or isolation pens. Finally, we were able to get 1 acre fenced. Then my wife gets another message that a 4H teenager is getting out of the goat business to spend more time with his girlfriend. They had another 5 female dwarf Nigerians and were willing to sell them cheap if we bought all 5. Therefore, we got another 5 females and were up to 13 goats. None of these were named, so we assigned them names based on how they looked and their personalities. Cookie was the largest with grey and white stripes. Elsie was black with a white face of a cow. Oreo was a mix of black and white. Bambi was all tan and looked like a momma to Thumper. And Loralie was the smallest and named by my brother as one of his favorite names. Now, the boys really needed their own section, so we divided the acre in half and put the boys into goat hell because they were completely distraught about being separated from all the girls that they had been living with for quite some time. The next thing on our list was getting some sort of protection animal for our growing herd. With goats you can get guard dogs, donkeys, or llamas. We didn’t want dogs because we already had dogs on the ranch and donkeys didn’t seem to be a friendly lot. My wife and I were thinking then about guard llamas but where do you even find something like that in rural Arkansas. Then my wife was at the feed store that same week we had been discussing this dilemma, and she overhears someone saying that they are getting out of the llama business and has 4 llamas they would like to sell. We found out later that the owner had a terminal disease and ended up passing away about a month or two later, but he was a very knowledgeable man who helped us get his llamas to our ranch. All three of the batches of animals we bought were coincidentally provided right at a time when we were asking God what to do. Each of them were also animals that were being sold because the owners just needed to get out of the business, which meant all of their personalities were great. No fear of mean animals trying to be gotten rid of at auction. Our herd was growing and now seemed protected. We grew quite attached to the male llama, whom we had named Kronk from the Emperor’s New Groove movie and the oldest female was Isma. The young female llamas we named Coco and Channel. Every goat had names and we swore all of our animals could recognize their name. Spring of 2022 came in with a bang because we learned what happens when you leave boy and girl goats together for so long. The birthing season wasn’t timed correctly so we were having babies during the end of winter still. Our first-born goat is my favorite because it crawled up into my lap the first week it was born and fell asleep. Overall, we had 10 babies that year and were feeling pretty good. Unfortunately, we lost 1 doe to a hard delivery because of our inexperience. I remember trying to help pull the baby out around midnight, but nothing worked. She went into labor on a Sunday and no vets were open to help. Monday, we took her to the vet to see what they could do. The baby was gone but they sent momma goat home with us and a checkup in two weeks. Momma goat didn’t survive the night. She was our first goat death less than a year after getting into the goat business. Her name was Loralie, and we named her burial field after her. Worse, we lost both Kronk and Isma in June due to the excessive heat and drought. I’m sure our inexperience contributed to their deaths, but we are learning from tragedy. Fortunately, we had mated Kronk with Koko and Channel in May but would have to wait until April of 2023 to see if it worked, because llamas take 11 months to make. On a good note, we now had several of our dairy goats making milk, so now what God? How is this supposed to be some sort of goat ministry. What do we do? We turned to the internet!

It was devastating news to hear that there was an offer on the place. I had just heard clearly from God to move to this house. This house had been on the market since October the previous year. The Devil tried to interfere with God’s plan, because the house had been on the market for about six months with no other previous offers. Just when we are the verge of following a God-inspired, life-changing decision, that same week is the week that an offer is made to compete with our plans. Speed and money become paramount normally, when someone hears that there is a competing offer on a house, but my family’s situation was not conducive to either. The price was at the very upper limit of what we could afford, which meant we could not afford a bidding war, and my work arrangements had not given me permission to move to another state, while continuing in the same job. This would mean I would have to wait, until I had permission from my employer to move, or quit my job with no immediate guarantees of a job in Arkansas that could cover our living expenses. Therefore, we were put into a position to question whether God really wanted us to buy this house and move. – which will become a theme. The way the Devil tries to wreck God’s work is by making you question God’s word or rush into decisions without thoughtful prayer and meditation. So, I told my wife that we would not rush into this, and if this offer on the house goes through, we will not be dismayed or dissuaded. I remember distinctly believing that the situation may even turn out to be that the house is bought by another person, but eventually we will live in this house. A day or two later after that decision to trust God’s word, we received confirmation of God’s blessing, when the competing offer fell through. This is a first illustration to show that doing the good work of God and following his plan is not always easy. In fact, we were barraged with opportunities to either question God’s plan and dismay, or trust that this really was God’s plan. Our story is meant to show people that these barrages are not uncommon, but more importantly they are not the final outcome. Hopefully, you will be encouraged in your own circumstances by hearing our story to gain the strength to stay your own course to follow God’s plan for your life. To set the stage for the additional illustrations, people should know that I personally would characterize myself as a very precise “math person.” What this means is that I cross my “T”s and dot my “I”s on money, schedules, cost versus benefits, etc. – Or at least I thought I did. For example, in preparation for the visit to see the house, I had contacted my bank to get a pre-approval mortgage rate as a “just in case” or if the seller wanted proof we could afford the house, before we would be allowed to see the place. It just so happened that mortgage rates were at historical lows over several decades. However, when we ran the numbers, the low rate was at the very top-end of our affordability. Even a 0.25% change in rate would put the monthly payments above what we could afford – which meant if that happened, I would most likely turn down the purchase and forgo moving. For my preapproval, we were able to lock in a low rate, and the bank even provided a 1-time “buy down” option for military members. The buy-down option allowed us to lock in a lower rate, if the rate dropped below the lock-in value. As it was, we locked in at a rate we could afford, and we made an offer that was eventually accepted. However, we needed to sell our Virginia house to afford this place using a Veteran Affairs (VA) loan; therefore, the offer on the Arkansas house had a strict contingency on the sale of our Virginia house. I figured that if this was God’s plan that everything would fall into place, and we would be on the fast track to become Arkansans. But, either God had a longer timeline than my own, or the Devil tried to wreck my faith in God’s plan. Bottomline, months went by without selling the Virginia house. So much so, that I learned my preapproval on my perfect mortgage rate had an expiration date. After about 60 days (and one 30-day extension), our bank informed us that we were no longer locked in on our mortgage rate, and we were subject to market fluctuations. To make matters worse, the forecasts were indicating that the rate was only going to go higher in the short and long term. We had to learn to trust that if this was truly God’s plan with God’s timing, then we needed to be patient and expect that the rate would be low enough for our financial situation. For March through August, we watched the mortgage markets with stressful, but faithful anticipation. The next illustration of trust had to deal with our own internal hesitations. When we started trying to sell our Virginia house, we found a realtor friend of ours, who was enthusiastically willing to represent our sale. She was rather insistent on decluttering the place to make the marketing photos better as well as “show” better. My wife and I diligently cleaned up the place, cleverly hid over crowded items, and all-in-all made it ten times better. I’ll never forget our realtor’s response when she came over to inspect…”so when are you guys going to declutter?” In her mind – and probably in truth – we hadn’t made enough of an effort to market the house well. She recommended pulling out everything that we didn’t need to live between now and selling the house, and putting it into storage pods. This obviously was a non-starter for me, because it would incur an unnecessary cost on an already expensive move at the top of our budget. It came down to a simple prayer and answer….if this is truly God’s plan, then you need to go all-in on this decision. Just shuffling around the clutter was not truly trusting God wanted us to move…it was a way to appear as though I wanted to move without having to commit any skin in the game. My wife and I decided for the all-in decision and loaded up 4 moving pods worth of clutter that went into storage, while incurring a monthly bill. As the months passed by with few showings, the storage bill began to take its toll on my strict financial stress – remember the mortgage rate problem is going on simultaneously. At the same time, I realized I had made a grievous error with the closing cost estimates. Worse…I had made a math error. With my estimate of closing costs on the Virginia house, closing costs on the Arkansas house, moving expenses, storage, etc., I had neglected to account for a several thousand-dollar delivery fee by the moving company. I was looking at a $25,000 short fall. I would have to come up with a way to make this move financially work without drastic actions like early liquidation of retirement funds. Moreover, when we finally did get an offer on our Virginia house, the buyer required we give up several items that we were not planning to leave behind – to include a brand-new washer and dryer with pedestals. Anyone who has shopped for these appliances knows that these aren’t cheap. The Virginia house buyers threatened to back out of the deal. This meant we were looking at additional costs on the back-end of the move to replace these appliances. Our last stressor that adds to picture is a scene right out of a movie. My biggest fear on this whole endeavor was that I would wreck my family’s completely stable situation. Before “God’s word came,” I had no reason to move. The family could afford our current situation, and it was a comfortable living. I had a nice future planned out. Then I get “God’s word to move,” and I start down a situation that some of my colleagues to this day think I’m crazy. I always had a fallback plan except for one fear: What happens if I sell my Virigina house and the purchase of the Arkansas house falls through in mid-move? I will have effectively made 4 adults in my care and myself homeless. The Devil brought everything about this fear to my doorstep. Fast forward to moving day out of the Virginia house. Our movers were nice enough people, but we had a horrible inventory labelling experience. Which meant if anything was missing, we would not have a proper description of what was lost. But, I had faith that we had set up a situation for a door-to-door move with a closing on the new house right as the truck was showing up in Arkansas. Our part of the closing of the Virginia house was completed, and our family started driving to Arkansas in hopes of the new life God had in store for us. – keep in mind that all of the financial stressors are still going on…my rate for the home loan was still in subject to market changes; I was still paying monthly storage pod fees; I still was trying to figure out the $25K shortage problem; but we had faith that God would work it out. Then my Virginia house buyers had a problem with their end of the closing and needed to extend the final closing date. I am now in Arkansas with my family. We were temporarily living with a friend of ours in their spare bedroom, and some of us are on their living room floor in sleeping bags. All of our belongings are in a moving truck—in transit—or in storage. At the moment, we don’t have a guaranteed place to live in Arkansas without this contingency sale of our Virginia house closing. To make matters more stressful, the Arkansas contract also had to be extended several times when our Virginia buyers needed another extension. Each time we needed an extension (because there were multiple), the Arkansas sellers wanted to remove the contingency. Our situation was such that I couldn’t afford the new house without the sale of the old house, because I needed the VA loan program. Thankfully the Arkansas sellers did continue to extend the contract and contingency. This living and contract extension situation goes on for over a month. The corresponding stress of 2 families living in a single residence, and no guaranteed home because Dad said God told him to move us…begins to build. Then, we finally have a definitive Arkansas closing date, and we set the date for the truck to deliver our goods, except the Virginia house delays again. Their delay means we cannot close on the Arkansas house, again. The timing of this was around Labor Day, and we finally close on the Virginia house late on a Friday. Since it was so late on a holiday weekend, the Arkansas house cannot close until Tuesday, but the delivery truck is literally “here to deliver” on that Friday afternoon. I will not name the moving company, but let’s just say the corporate office was less than empathetic to my family’s plight. The options they offered us was: 1) Local storage—this would have to be found, on the spot, on a Friday afternoon. They would need availability to store our goods for 3-4 days, and I would have to pay a separate fee for local movers to move it from local storage to the house after closing. 2) Long-term moving company storage—this was assured to me as an option by the company, but I called the owner of their long-term storage location. The owner said there were no spots available for a couple of weeks. So, this was never a viable option. 3) Return to the state of origin and try delivery again in a few weeks—they of course would charge me 3 times the original moving cost (VA to AR, then AR back to VA, and finally VA to AR), which would be another $40,000 - $50,000. 4) See if we can store it in the garage on-site.—the Arkansas sellers were losing patience with us and would not let us occupy the house before officially closing. Needless to say, I had realized my greatest fear. I had effectively put my entire household in homeless situation and created a financial situation that was untenable with no way out. It was at this point of questioning myself that I cried out: “If this is your plan God, I need a little help here.” I can honestly say that if we didn’t have faith in God and tried to do this all on our own, it would have been much worse. Thankfully, God had a remedy for all of my problems. First, the Arkansas sellers allowed us to unload our household goods into the garage for a daily fee. On the surface this doesn’t seem feasible to move a crammed 5-bedroom house into a garage, except on this property, there were 6 garages. More importantly, 2 of them were oversized and in a barn. When the truck unloaded all of our boxes and furniture, we filled up the entirety of the 6 car garages. If the property had only 5 garages or even normal sized garages, then we would have not been able to store all of our household goods. Second, the mortgage rate went against the forecasts and stayed low, such that both final closing costs had overages in our favor. The Virginia house ended up having a $10,000 refund, and the Arkansas house ended up having a $15,000 refund. This amount was the exact miscalculation I had made when I agreed to execute this move. It was precisely the amount we needed to make this happen – No more but no less. Third, my work had submitted me for a “good job” bonus due to some good business in the Winter and Spring. The bonus had been delayed in the processing, so that it wasn’t awarded until the Summer. The bonus was exactly the amount needed to cover the storage fees when we made the all-in decision to follow God’s plan fully – No more but no less. Lastly, even items like our washer and dryer that we were stressing about replacing from our Virginia house sale, didn’t need replacements. The Arkansas sellers left the exact appliances we had to leave in Virginia. It wasn’t something we asked for, they were just left by the sellers. To make matters more interesting, our original appliances we left behind would not have fit in the space that the Arkansas house had for them. There was a counter top built directly over the existing appliances that was too small for them, even without the pedestals. As a result, we didn’t have to incur financial cost to replace these items. In the end, we made the move and every financial and schedule stressor worked itself out in God’s time, in God’s way, and in God’s purpose. Some might say that we were very lucky or very privileged to make all this happen, and there never was a God plan for this self-induced, life-stressing event. Given the sheer number of coincidences on the finding of the perfect house and the moving problems working out, I find that argument interesting to debate. I will end this chapter with a sad note for the reader to understand God’s perfect timing and a reason to trust his plan when it doesn’t make any sense. My mother made the move with us but sadly passed away 1 year after we arrived in Arkansas. The 6-leaf clover image that is on the cover of this chapter is a real 6-leaf clover. As the ambulance was coming to get her, it is the response I got from God while praying: “Is everything going to be ok for Mom?” I have a gift for finding 4-leaf clovers anytime I look and I even found 5-leaf clovers when we were stressing about the move. We have always treated this rare occurrence as some reassurance that our situation will be ok. This has been my only 6-leaf clover I have found, and it was pretty beat up. It reminds me that God’s answer of "everything will be ok" doesn't always mean physical healing in this life. There is a bigger plan that we do not always get to see while living on this Earth. At the time of the move, my mother was not terminal, and we had no indications that this would be the last year of her life. She had mobility issues but not anything terminal. Her last year on this earth was her perfect last year. The very first weekend we were in the actual house, turned out to also be her 50th high school reunion, which she was able to attend and re-connect with all of her friends. She was able to re-connect with her only living family members like her sister that she had lunch with every day. We had a family reunion during Christmas that was the first (and only) time that all of her sisters and the cousins were in the same location – the family picture I have of that event is a priceless memory, and I thank God for every time I look at it. We had a display case outside her bedroom to display and eventually use her favorite heirloom china she had given us. These items were the only thing she ever really missed seeing, since they were packed in boxes for the years she lived with us in Virginia. There were even small things that made a special blessing to my mother, like the house had a built-in ice maker and hot water dispenser. These were special blessings from God just for her, because she used both of those things every day as a small creature comfort. Every morning, she and I would have coffee in the living room, and she would literally giggle about how blessed she felt being here and reconnecting with people. Even when a rare disease popped up and took her mobility, the house was handicap ready, before we even knew we needed it. Her wheelchair fit through doorways; the pool had a handicap lift to get her in and out of the pool; we had the right furniture and medical devices to provide her assistance until it came time for the hospital. Ultimately this rare disease took my mother’s life, but if the only benefit we had for moving to this place was for my mother’s last year of life, then I still think it is totally worth it! I share this testimony to encourage those going through your own God’s plan moment. It is meant to show you that the Devil is real and will try to mess with your faith in God’s plan for you, but it is more importantly meant to reinforce Chapter 1’s statement that God is real and has a perfect plan with his perfect timing. The only thing we have to do is to persevere with faith that it will come true. My last comment on this chapter is that the Lord’s plan for us didn’t end there…Then God said “start a goat ministry.” I knew nothing about farming, and less than nothing about goats.