Finding Hope After Loss — Part One: When the Barn Lights Still Burn

There’s a certain kind of quiet only a farm knows. It’s the hush just before dawn, when the sky is still the color of deep denim and the only sound is cattle shifting in the fields.  Long before I ever understood the weight of loss, I learned how steady life could feel when the barn and tractor lights glowed across the fields and lots—little beacons of warmth, purpose, and belonging.

I grew up on a cattle and hay farm in Southern Illinois, the kind of place where the seasons shaped our days and faith shaped everything else. Morning chores weren’t just tasks; they were rhythm. A heartbeat. The way our family moved through the world. My dad would already be outside before the sun came up, and the beams from our barn would stretch across the frost-covered ground like God had flipped on the lights Himself.

And we weren’t the only ones awake. Across the fields, you could see my godparents’ barn lights glowing too—those soft, steady lamps that reminded me our little farming community was waking up together. Even as a child, I could feel the life on our farms. It was like the land breathed with us.

There was comfort in the simple things: the smell of hay, the sound of boots on gravel, walking in the creek, climbing up in the old hay loft, playing in the corn crib, swimming in the ponds, the creak of a barn door, diesel fuel fumes from the John Deere tractor, breakfast on the stove top, and coffee strong enough to drift through every closed door of the house. Those ordinary moments became the threads that stitched my childhood together—threads I would cling to years later.

And even though I grew up without siblings, I was never alone. Not for a moment.

In our small corner of Crab Orchard, community wasn’t something you found—it was something you were born into. I went to Crab Orchard Schools, a tiny little school where just thirty-six of us graduated together. Most of us had been side by side since kindergarten. We knew each other’s families, farms, heartbreaks, and joys. We rode horses together, helped one another throw hay in the summers, showed up to each other’s ballgames, and somehow always ended up in someone’s mom’s kitchen being fed.

Those friends were like brothers and sisters to me—the kind who shaped my childhood long before I understood how much I would need roots that deep. Looking back now, I can see how God wove all of it together, gently building a foundation beneath me that would one day hold more weight than I ever imagined carrying.

Life was simple then—beautifully, wonderfully simple. A steady rhythm of farm chores, family, school days, laughter, and long evenings when the barn lights glowed like lanterns of hope across our little community.

What I didn’t know then was that years later, in the hallways of the College of Agriculture at Southern Illinois University, I would meet the man who would change my life and weave his story into mine in a way only God could have written.

Randy was more than a farm kid—he was a livestock broker with a gift for reading cattle, an auctioneer whose voice could roll through a sale barn like thunder, and a man with dreams big enough to stretch across every pasture he ever walked. At the time, he had just been to embryo transfer school in Mississippi, full of excitement and vision because we were getting ready to start our own ET business.

My dad, Randy, and our friends Tom and Ruben spent days out in the old tack room, turning it into a lab—measuring, sawing, wiring, building a dream with their own hands. I can still picture the dust hanging in the sunlight when the door swung open, hear their laughter echoing across the yard, and feel the electricity of hope in the air.

It was a season full of life. Full of promise. Full of ordinary moments that didn’t feel extraordinary at the time…but now mean everything.

Before the summer everything changed, our life felt rich and blessed. We were raising our boys to know the same rhythms and values that shaped us. We were building a family, a business, and a future rooted deep in the soil of Illinois.

I didn’t know then that I was gathering memories I would cling to later—moments I would replay when the world went quiet and the barn lights didn’t feel the same.

Because before the valley, there was the hilltop.
Before the grief, there was goodness.
And before the loss, there was life—rich, ordinary, holy life—on a farm where the barn lights still burned.