Unclean

"Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked?" -Ecclesiastes 7:13

Some things are just unclean. They can't help it; they were made that way. Take for instance the common household fly...

I had a friend recently ask me,"Why did God make flies?" I am usually rather quick to answer such an agriculturally spiritual question, but this one had me stumped. "Let me ponder this," I said; and so I have. I've spent days researching the Scriptures and praying about flies. Is this pointless? Hardly. Nothing that takes you to the Lord and His Word is pointless.

What I've come to understand is that flies have the business of making things defiled. When a fly lands in your drink, will you continue to drink it? I hope not. When that ugly little insect plants himself on your sandwich and raises his little back legs to rub together, are you inclined to just watch the beauty of it? Not likely. There are whole sections of the manufacturing world dedicated to the deflection and removal of flies. Every day in the summer, I spray down my horses with a fly repellent or else the flies swarm them as if they're already dead. In my home, I hang fly paper in strategic locations to keep them from landing in places I don't want them. Outside my doors, I hang traps with a fly bait in them so that flies will crawl into them and not be able to get out. Many people buy another insect that feeds on fly larvae so that they don't mature. In general, the fly is despised because it's dirty.

Flies contaminate. They spread disease. They leave little, nasty dark spots where they've lingered. Why, God? Why the fly?

Flies in Scripture were used as a form of pestilence upon Pharaoh. They were a tool to punish him for his stubborn oppression of the Hebrews.

"As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor." -Ecclesiastes 10:1

It is easy to make something unclean. One little fly landing in your drink will contaminate your whole drink. Simply removing the fly is not enough, because he's already permeated your drink with his filth. According to the covenant between Israel and God, anything that was unclean had rigid guidelines for becoming clean again...and it was never as easy as becoming unclean. Some things were irreparable, but most things were cleansed in a variety of ways: Blood sacrifice, Ash, Hyssop, Fire, Water. These are the five most common elements I found in Scripture used for cleansing.

1)Blood- I understand that blood is the carrier of life. It delivers nutrients and oxygen for the regeneration of cells. It is the principle of life; it is vitality itself. It delivers essential things to what was deficient and helps make things whole.

2)Ash- It is the residue of a thing that was burned. Ash in our lives signifies that we've been tried by a fire and what is left is clean. Whatever makes it through the fire of Adonai is what is worthwhile to Him. In the Bible, people put ash on themselves in mourning to remember their own mortality and that they needed to live a life that would pass through the fire of the Almighty. Reflecting on such things has a very purifying effect.

3)Hyssop- This is an herb of the mint family that has been used to cure indigestion. It is oftentimes planted among other vegetables because it deters pests that would eat them. It was used in the Bible to paint the doorposts of the Hebrews with lamb's blood during the first Passover, and it was used to lift the vinegar soaked sponge up to Jesus on the cross.

4)Fire- Our God is a consuming fire. Fire eats up dross. Anything worthless in the eyes of our God is incinerated. Only hard, lasting things will remain. Fire flushes impurities and causes them to show themselves. Other things that are unclean, fire can cause to simply die. It is the great separator of the temporal and eternal. Fire is a visible, active phase of combustion, manifested in light and heat.

5)Water- This is the one element that all life requires to live. There is no variation in that. Water flows and cleanses and washes. It is powerful and can sweep away filth. Consider the story of Noah. When the world was evil, God chose water to make it like new.

What man can straighten what God has made crooked? The answer is no man. We cannot make the fly clean. We cannot wash away our sins. We cannot remedy our natural bent toward pain, destruction, selfishness, etc. All these things are things only God can do if He so chooses. You could sacrifice an animal, you could dump ashes on your head, you could scrub yourself with hyssop, you could run through flames, and you could nearly drown yourself in an ocean....but you cannot cleanse yourself of your guilt and you cannot make yourself clean.

"If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives." -1 John 1:7-10

There is one way to be made whole; there is one way to be made clean. His name is Jesus Christ, God's Risen Son. His blood is sufficient for me. His blood is sufficient for you. Before we come to Christ, we live as flies: contaminating everything we touch. "Without Christ, we do nothing but add sin to sin." -John Wesley. With Christ working in us, and us yielding to His guidance, we no longer have to live crooked and unclean. We can be bearers of life, sharing in the fellowship of His suffering, easing suffering and protecting, separating the holy from the profane, and powerfully sweeping away all that contaminates us. Hallelujah!

Hospitality

The dictionary defines hospitality like this: "The act of being kind and generous in manner toward guests, affording or expressing welcome and generosity toward guests. To be receptive in mind."

What is hospitality to you? The Bible says in Romans 12:13 to "Practice hospitality." Does that mean that you should clean your bathroom before your guest arrives and offer them a cup of coffee when they do arrive? Maybe. What if hospitality demands more, though? How far would you go to be a good host? Is your house really your friend's house?

I ask this because we have our hospitality stretched and redefined and challenged over and over. As a farm, people want to experience here what they cannot experience at their own home. They can experience a clean bathroom and a cup of coffee anywhere (well, almost anywhere), but can they explore and experiment everywhere? Not really. Is your home somewhere that they can?

Allow me to tell you a story:

One day, a friend who lives in the city asked me if that day would be a good one to bring his son to visit and play. I hesitated, knowing I was busy that day, but decided to allow them to come because life is short and my tasks would wait, and we never know what we are forgoing when we put tasks above the importance of people. So, they asked what they could do to have fun here, and I gave the standard response of bottle-feeding a baby goat, giving treats to the horses, etc. Then I mentioned that I had a goat to butcher, and my respective guest asked if he could help. Again, I hesitated, but decided to acquiesce further and offer that he could shoot it. He was delighted and immediately loaded his family into the car, along with his shotgun and drove to my house.
Upon arrival, I brought him to the barn and roped a basically wild goat for butchering. I dragged him, leaping and flailing, out of the barn and tied him to the trailer hitch so he couldn't be a running target. My guest loaded his gun and took aim. His wife stood next to me, half-shielding her face and sticking her fingers in her ears. *BAM*! The first shot was off-target and put a hole in the goat's jaw. My guest grimaced and his wife yelled,"The poor thing! Just kill it!" He reloaded his gun and quickly lined up another shot. *BAM*! Unfortunately, he just made the hole in the jaw larger and the goat was bawling with his tongue and chin hanging limply open. I pulled my guest over behind the goat and pointed with my finger precisely where he needed to shoot to kill the goat immediately. He rummaged in his pocket for another shotgun shell, but found he was out. He ran to the car to get another bullet while his wife and I simply watched the goat bleed and bawl. On his way back, my son stopped him and asked,"Do you like putting holes in goats?" As if he didn't feel bad enough! He loaded his shotgun one more time and successfully dispatched of the goat.
Here now, my work began. I had to string the goat up on the gambrel hook, pelt it, gut it, wash it, and process it into roasts and ground before it spoiled because the weather was warm. He was too traumatized by his failure to quickly dispatch of the goat to join in on the rest of the labor. His wife helped take the pelt off a little bit, but both of them needed to shake the experience from their minds a little, so they distanced themselves from the task. When my husband came home, he helped clean up the mess and finish processing the carcass.

How far would you go for hospitality?

"Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms." 1 Peter 4:10

To be blameless before the Lord, we must be willing to not withhold any good thing from those we claim we love. Are you willing to be stinky, dirty, tired, bloody, etc so that others may be glad they came to your home?

These particular guests are remembering their visit to my farm to this day. I hope they consider me a friend who prefers them above myself. My life is not my own, my home is not my own, my time is not my own. All I do must be to the glory of God....even if the picture of this resembles a goat with a detached jaw.

Sustainable Living

"Adonai's trees are satisfied--the cedars of Lebanon, which he has planted. In them sparrows built their nests, while storks live in the fir trees."-Psalm 104:16

A buzz word around here is "sustainable agriculture". The idea behind it is to make sure that as you harvest from the land, that you manage to give back and take care of the land at the same time. Many people do it by spreading manure back onto their lands and sowing minerals back into their soil. Most important, is to remember the essence of "bio-diversity". To respect bio-diversity, you must remember that living things were never meant to be segregated, but integrated. For instance, God didn't send the bunnies to Vermont and the foxes to Indiana and the deer to Montana....he integrated living things to benefit from each other. The more that farming can mimic that, the more it will be a "sustainable" farm that gives back to the land that gives to the farmer.

The Lord led me to meditate on this. What is "sustainable living"? I believe that sustainable living is firstly remembering that all life comes from God. Psalm 104:27-30 says,"All of them look to you to give them their food when they need it. When you give it to them, they gather it; when you open your hand, they are well satisfied. If you hide your face, they vanish; if you hold back their breath, they perish and return to their dust. If you send out your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth."
The Lord provides for all He has created according to His flawless will. The trees have no want for water unless He is withholding that water for a divine purpose. He keeps the tree either watered or not based upon his particular use for that tree. In verse 16, referenced above, it mentions that in the well-watered tree a sparrow can build it's nest. I long to be the sort of tree that the Lord can feel confident enough in that He may lead a "sparrow" to "nest" in me. In other words, I'd like people to find a home in my heart, and feel safe enough to bring the vulnerability of their lives into me to find a place to grow. May I be pleasing to you, Adonai. Amen. However, a tree cannot water itself.

"Think about the wild irises, and how they grow. They neither work nor spin thread; yet, I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed as beautifully as one of these. If this is how God clothes grass, which is alive in the field today and thrown in the oven tomorrow, how much more will he clothe you! What little trust you have!" -Luke 12:27&28
What little trust we have. We long to have our neat little life in our neat little box with our neat little labels so that WE CAN UNDERSTAND IT! Oh, but what peace we forfeit when we don't yield to God's design for things. Unless the Lord builds the house, he labors in vain who builds it. Trust in Adonai, and find yourself sustained. Even if the Lord withholds your rain or your physical breath, you will find your soul sustained by the peace that passes understanding. The riches of heaven are not jewels or gold or filthy mammon of any kind. The riches of heaven include shalom and brotherly love.

Seek first your first love....your Creator and Sustainer. Be a place others can call home as you lean on the sustenance and peace of Adonai. Don't strive. For anything.

THAT is sustainable living. "Give, and you will receive gifts--the full measure, compacted, shaken together and overflowing, will be put right in your lap. For the measure with which you measure out will be used to measure back to you!" -Luke 6:38

Throwing Kids

Yup, I'm branching out into agricultural terminology again. "Throwing kids" is a term in reference to a sire passing his genetics onto his progeny. For example, you could say,"He throws nice kids," or "He throws sickly kids," or whatever.

When God created the human race, the threw us kids out from the intricacy of Himself. We were carved from the network of His Being. "Then God said,'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.' So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." -Genesis 1:26&27
So here we are, kids thrown from a divine father onto an earth of clay. Our very "image of God" is encased in clay. Our spirit is what God threw out here, and he clothed it in clay. Why, oh, why did he make us out of clay? Clay is heavy and hardly penetrable by water. It's not very fertile and when baked, it's brittle. Clay by itself is not very useful. It takes skill in the hands of a Master Potter to make anything useful of it.

Encased in flesh, thrown from heaven, we were commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Thusly, man threw kids of his own. He stamped his genetic material on his children as surely as God stamped His image on man. Oh, and then the challenge begins! Now that you have been faithful to multiply and produce children, you are saddled with the task of raising these children. What a privilege to be seen fit for this task! However, it's a weighty responsibility. I am not a father, but I have watched my husband struggle over and over with the cumbersome role of "father". It is not enough for man to sire, but he must "train and nurture".

"Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord." -Ephesians 6:4
Needless to say, you mustn't actually

throw your children!

Seriously, though, fathers are required to avoid the trauma associated with brutalizing their children's hearts. Oh, so easy to do! At either extreme is an overbearing, hard-to-please father who rides their child's tail until they crack from the pressure; then there's a withdrawn or absent father who doesn't seem to have any hope or vision for his child, so the child hardly knows what to do with himself/herself. I have found the most beautiful tactic to be one of remaining humble. When you have made a mistake with your child, just ask forgiveness and talk about why it's wrong. Children are so quick to forgive.

Personally, all of the work of my hand bears fruit in some way. Every action is "throwing a kid" per se, because I have taken an idea and put some legs on it with putting it into happening. I must daily examine the work of my hands to compare it to God's standard of holiness. The "kids" I throw today may breed trouble down the line for myself or someone else; or the "kids" may serve as a source of prosperity and health for someone else or myself.

Throw good kids.

God did.

Get Up, Sleeper!

"For you used to be darkness; but now, united with the Lord, you are light. Live like children of light, for the fruit of the light is in every kind of goodness, rightness and truth-- try to determine what will please the Lord. Have nothing to do with the deeds produced by darkness, but instead expose them, for it is shameful even to speak of the things these people do in secret. But everything exposed to the light is revealed clearly for what it is, since anything revealed is a light. This is why it says, 'Get up, sleeper! Arise from the dead, and the Messiah will shine on you!' Therefore, pay careful attention to how you conduct your life-- live wisely, not unwisely. Use your time well, for these are evil days. So, don't be foolish, but try to understand what the will of the Lord is." -Ephesians 5:8-17

This is a long passage of Scripture, I know. However, it is a sobering call to live a life of quality. I don't know about you, but sometimes, I forfeit my spiritual sobriety for the sake of laziness or lack of self-control.

Before we started our farm, my husband and I wasted a lot of time. We almost unavoidably disobeyed this Scripture because we didn't have any vision for how our days/evenings/weekends should be spent. God had to put a huge burden like farming into our laps before we began to discipline our time into being more honoring for Him. With our spare time, we would argue. We would indulge our feelings more because we had way too much time to think about them. Our energies were wrapped up in self-evaluation.

Now, our days are forced to be structured because of the nature of what we do. In just the past year alone I've had to mortify my flesh and cry out to God to be my strength more times than I can count. Last summer, I had my last gallbladder attack. The only reason it was my last was because I had it taken out finally. Within one day of surgery, I was back to barn chores and milking my goats. You may say I am crazy, but who else would do it? A few days later, my best milker was in labor with the biggest goat kid I've ever seen and he was STUCK! Try twisting and pulling a slippery baby out of a screaming, flailing momma goat with four incision marks in your abdomen and then you'll understand what it is to want to throw in the towel! That winter, I battled the worst immune crash. I was still in the mode of milking all of my goats and hauling buckets and chucking hay bales, but I had pneumonia so badly that I was supposed to be hospitalized (but I wouldn't let them hospitalize me because who else would take care of things?). "Lord, be my breath!" I cried out. I literally couldn't breathe. After that was a bout with shingles and then another bout of pneumonia. After my immune system began to recover in the month of April, I came down with a severe tooth infection that left me unable to work. "Lord, be my strength!" I cried out. I was literally shaking and falling down in my weakness over my fatigue. I was unable to sleep for six weeks because of the pain. Why was I not going to doctors? Well, I open myself to criticism at this point, because I wanted God to be my healer.

I tell you this tale because I want you to understand that the laws of our Lord are set up to guide us and that God put my farm over me and my husband as a master. As much as we were called to subdue the earth, the earth we are working is subduing us. The greatest remedy for self-absorption is reducing yourself to utter helplessness and allowing yourself to be crushed....and then pressing on. Nothing in me wants to leave the house at midnight when I'm bone-tired and freezing cold to help a prolapsed sheep get her insides back inside again in the dead of winter. Nothing in me wants to go through a hard day of labor and then realize that I have more labor to do before I can rest.

What I'm getting at is this: God will likely put things in your life to HELP you become a supreme manager of time, because the days are short. God will also likely put things in your life to help you become a supreme example of holiness because we have a high calling of holiness since he's invested his best in us. Don't let Him down. Don't blow your opportunities He's giving you by deciding to whine or complain or escape His schoolmaster He's given to help grow and expand you. The psalmist David said: "He has enlarged me in my distress."

O dear, brother/sister: Hear me when I tell you that He will not give you more than you can bear. Be holy. Don't waste YOUR time or GOD'S efforts. Unless the Lord builds the house, he who builds it labors in vain. Get up, sleeper! Please your Lord!

"At the beginning of this night, (he) had admitted an utter helplessness, and that was a terrible thing, like death. Despair, defeat, and death. But see what the dear (Lord) had done to helplessness? (He) consecrated it. (He) turned it into infancy, and that is a hopeful, holy thing, like the beginning of life." -Walter Wangerin,jr. 'The Book of Sorrows'