Remembering The Refuge Barn

by reg daniel

My mother told about the exciting times of the Mississippi River floods of yesteryear. No warnings. A few levees here and there. Neighbors helping neighbors. Getting around by boat. Crops ruined for a year. No food stamps---and not much food.

Mother and her family, like gobs of Arkansas folks, were poor as church mice in those days. Mother's family had one of those in-disguise-blessings. It was the blessing of high ground. As a matter of fact, they had the highest ground in the area. At the pinnacle of high ground was an old barn.

So when those long-ago floods hit their stride, all the neighbors and their animals made their way to the high ground barn. And there they all lived for several days. Since mother's house was on a lower elevation than the barn, they, too, had to join the barn camp out.

Well, it was not exactly a camp out. At least not a planned camp out. Not much space, no video games, no electricity, and no deodorant. Smelly animals and smelly people.

Like the rest of the kids, mother enjoyed chasing chickens, trying to milk the cows, and sleeping on hay. It seems to have never crossed their minds that if the rain kept up, they would wind up on top of the barn, instead of in it.

Mother was not real big on plain ole vanilla adventure, but she loved those almost arky experiences of her childhood. And I loved hearing about those episodes.

A few lessons from the high ground barn have wafted their way into my plain vanilla mind. 1. Difficult times often cause people to pull together. 2. Even the poor have something to offer. 3. You can endure tuff times when you must. 4. We all need a refuge sometime. 5. The Refuge you need is not a barn with a sheep in it, but is rather the Shepherd Himself.

I wrote this with hopes that you get something from it. And to remember mother. She died one day before Edith's birthday, 2009.

Blessings, wreg

P.S. May you receive some blessings that are not in disguise.