Over the last 12-18 months here on the homestead, we have learned that as important as it is to have plans and stick with them, it is equally important to learn how to be flexible and change your priorities.
Life has a way of liking to throw a curve ball, or two (or ten), your way just when you think you have everything figured out! The last couple of years have been full of turns that we didn’t see coming, getting used to them, and then something else changing.
At the beginning of the year, we posted about a hawk that kept getting into our chickens, our desire to build a brand new coop, and what we hoped this coop would be able to do to help deter predators. Now here we are 10 months later with none of that coming to fruition.
Over the summer we had life creep up on us and make building the new coop a big challenge. Between vehicles in the shop, all our summer activities (here and here), building a new fence, and some job changes, life had us pushing the coop and a couple of other projects we were looking forward to straight to the back burner.
But now that we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, looking back and wondering where all the time has gone, we see that God had a hand in it all along and that maybe not building the coop this year is going to be better for us in the long run than if we had built it.
See, the last few years have been full of growth in our personal lives, and that growth, while it wasn’t visible for a very long time, is not only starting to be visible, it’s also starting to impact other areas of our lives. With this growth in the other aspects of out lives, it is slowly creaking open new doors for growth for the Homestead that we had never even thought about before!
So our plans changed. Do we still want a new chicken coop? Yes. But will our original plan for how we were going to build it work? No. And that’s fine. Because you can plan all you want, but in the end its going to change… probably multiple times, and come out better than you thought it would.
We aren’t to the point of seeing the end of our plans but in the midst of them very slowly changing and morphing into something we only thought possible in our dreams, we see where life throwing curve balls at you can sometimes be a really good thing.
Take care now,
Jo Jo King
