Did you know that God has His own combine? It is called the Great White Combine, and it comes to farmers' fields in the middle of summer, relieving us of the task of harvesting those crops later in the season.
The Great White Combine is hail, and it visited my community earlier this summer. It was the day before I was to leave for holidays with my sister. There was a brief lull in the work to be done on the farm, as we had just about finished making the first cut of hay, and could breathe a little easier for a few weeks. Or, so we thought.
I was exercising in my office when I heard a racket outside. Thinking my roommate had come home, I stopped for a moment and listened, but no greeting reached my ears. As the racket grew louder, I glanced out the window to see large hailstones bouncing off my dad's truck parked in front of my house. My dad was on the tractor, trying to get the last little bit of hay baled. He says the noise was deafening.
Rushing about the house, I quickly closed windows, praying the few old ones still left in the house would hold up. When I had finished, I found myself in the living room and suddenly a thought burst upon my consciousness: "The crops! The crops will be ruined!"
Totally helpless, I stood in the living room, barely able to pray that the hail would stop. In a rational moment, I grabbed my Bible off the shelf and flipped to Habakkuk 3:17-19, verses I had discovered just a few weeks before. These verses speak of trusting God when the crops fail. I wasn't comforted much by reading them, but at least I had something from which to draw strength in that moment.
When the storm was over, I went out to investigate. I found broken window glass from various outbuildings all over the yard. My rain gauge was smashed into several pieces. Dad's truck was dented to such an extent that the insurance company would later write it off. The garden, which I had laboured to save from flooding just a few days earlier, was completely destroyed, as well as waterlogged. Pieces of shingles lay at the bottom of the downspouts on my house.
When I had seen as much as I could take in the yard, I hopped into my car to go check the fields. I met my dad on the road and we returned to the farm, got into his damaged truck, and went together. All around us, we could see the devastation. Huge holes were gaped in the siding of houses. Large green trees had blown over fence lines and were laying across the road, so that we could barely get by. Every field we passed seemed to be utterly flattened.
We met a neighbour on the road. I had never considered him to be old before. He really isn't old at all - maybe 15 years older than me. That day, though, he looked old and worn as he dragged a branch off the road in front of his truck. His words chilled me more than the ice that lay piled in the ditches: "Nothin' left." His young daughter smiled and waved at us from the back seat of the truck, blissfully ignorant of huge weight upon the shoulders of the adults. I wondered how often I had innocently played and smiled while my daddy bore the losses that are so common on the farm.
Finally, we arrived at the first field of our own. It was my canola field, which I rent from my cousin, a few miles north of home. I could have wept with relief when we saw that the ditches had no hail in them and the the crop was standing perfectly, apparently untouched by the storm.
Other fields are closer to home, and those crops were completely destroyed. I lost about 70 acres of oats, and my dad lost about half of his barley. We're hoping we can at least make green feed out of them, now that they have grown back. Further down the highway, the remaining 30 acres of oats stood, slightly damaged, but not too bad. The rest of Dad's barley was in decent shape, too.
Over the coming weeks we heard stories of how much our neighbours had lost. Some had insurance. Others, like us, didn't. Some lost all of their crops. Others, like us, had only lost some.
I spent my holidays trying to forget about what awaited me at home and trying to write a blog that would describe what had happened. I was not successful with either goal, though I did manage to have fun with my sister and the friends that we met up with.
Now that harvest is upon us, we look around at our fields, hoping for decent yields from those crops that survived the storm. The rest were harvested by God's combine, and we have to trust Him to provide what we cannot provide for ourselves.
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| The animals were unharmed by the storm. This picture doesn't show the sheer amount of ice that lay on the ground afterwards. |
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| The garden was both destroyed and waterlogged. |
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| My poor beets somehow managed to survive, though I certainly didn't expect them to when I took this picture. |
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| We had so much rhubarb this year - until the hail shredded it. |
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| The hail even stripped bare the saskatoon sapling which I had planted just days earlier. |
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| You can see the trees lying across the road. |
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| My canola, standing strong and untouched by the storm, though only a few miles away from home. |
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| My oats in the larger field, totally destroyed. |
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| My oats in the smaller field. There is some damage, but not much. |
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| I found pieces of my rain gauge strewn across the lawn and the driveway. |
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| Even the piece that held the rain gauge to the fence was smashed. |
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| Checking fences in the pasture at sunset. We had so much grass before the storm that we worried the pastures would be overgrown. Now they look overgrazed. |
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