The One Who Loves Me Most
The temperature is -3 and I hear the incessant barking of our Livestock Guard Dogs (LGD’s). I hurriedly suit up for the dangerous temperatures and head to the closest pasture. Three of my 4 LGD’s are in their pastures, barking continuously at something outside the pastures.
Far off in the distance I hear the unmistakable barking of Poppy, one of the 3 younger dogs that are siblings. I call her name and she runs quickly to the place she’d breached the fence, bounding up to me in the pasture in mere seconds. She’s “smiling” as if to say she’s proud of herself.
I feel nauseous as I stand there making myself praise Poppy for heeding my call so quickly. She at least did that. But my mind automatically finds itself back in a similar place from years gone by. A place that occasionally haunts me when I think of it for too long, the years I spent trying to keep Patti, another LGD, in the pasture.
After many years of unsuccessfully trying to keep Patti safe in our pastures, I decided to allow her to guard at another farm out of state that had a supposed “escape proof” fencing system in their pastures. She escaped from that farm within seconds of being put in the pasture.
I made several trips to try and find Patti, ran ads in the local paper where she disappeared, a reporter even wrote articles during the time she was missing. Finally, 2–1/2 years later I brought her home to our farm. She never tried to leave the pastures again.
I’ve been blessed to live with and work alongside LGD’s for almost 20 years and I’ve come to realize certain dogs want to guard outside pasture fences before a predator can breach the fence. I understand that, even accepted that in Patti’s case, but she’d also dangerously decided to play “chicken” with passing cars on the road and visited neighboring farms to make sure their livestock was safe. Some neighbors didn’t understand Patti was trying to protect their livestock, not hurt it. Their automatic solution was to, “shoot, shovel and shut up” when it came to dogs that weren’t theirs on the property.
When I heard Poppy’s faraway barking, my mind went immediately to Patti and her escape stories and all I’d gone through to try and keep her safe. I automatically assumed Poppy’s situation would be the same. I expected the worst, first.
If I’m honest, I do this often — expect the worst first and brace for it almost without thinking. Even when the end of a story could just as easily end up happy, I choose to see the unhappy ending based on past experience. And even though I finally got Patti back home safely, I still tend to automatically see all I went through to make that happen, instead. As if I was the one who kept her safe when she was errant. As if all the things I did to find her are really what brought her home. Yes, they did help but they were not what inevitably brought Patti back to me.
It was my Good Shepherd Who did. He heard my literal cries; He saw my broken heart and frequent nightmares — understood why this dog was so important for me to get back. He saw my love for her and brought her back to live her final days with the person who loved her most.
How do I thank Him for doing that? I can’t. I just can’t. Except that I can try to live my life in a way that puts my trust in the Good Shepherd first regardless of the situation, to expect the best first instead of the worst, to remember Patti’s story and the eventual happy ending of it — to internalize the Good Shepherd is the One Who loves me most and really does cause all things to work together for the good for me simply because I am His beloved sheep.
Jackie Deems copyright 2022
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28