Category Archives: homesteading

beautiful mess: when our colors start changing

Posted on by September 30, 2023

I was afraid they would take over our living room, but so far it’s been okay.

About a hundred tomatoes are growing in two pots next to the couch (and a hundred more in two other pots that are growing in the basement) because the nights started getting too cold to leave them out there but they were still too small to harvest, just tiny green clusters that looked like grapes. So we pushed them up against the window where they could get twelve hours of daylight in the safety of a frost-free environment.

beautiful mess: when our colors start changing

I was also afraid that bugs would crawl out of the pots and start emerging everywhere, but so far there’s just been one little spider who built an ambitious web among the branches. For a while I let him, thinking that if there was a fruit fly problem, he would help mitigate it. But then he got presumptuous and expanded his architecture into a grand multi-dimensional Taj Ma-spiderweb that made me nervous, so I gave him an eviction notice and dusted him out of there so I could reach the growing tomatoes.

Because lo and behold, it’s working; they are changing colors. We are growing ripe tomatoes in our house. YAY. Almost a dozen are ready to be picked, and all I need now is some feta.

Fall is magical and idyllic: the colors, the sunlight, the new books, the new ambitions. Cham’s in the library rocking chair and Kav’s on the floor nearby, both reading. I’m almost done with Anne of Green Gables (which is perfect for fall) and all of Anne’s studies and concerts and recitations make me daydream about homeschool co-ops and reading groups.

Several packages of books came in the mail this week – some for the new school year, and others of our own to replenish inventory – and I’m listening to a teaching in my office while I reshelve everything. The speaker starts interceding for different cities and suddenly I don’t know why but I’m crying – and why am I crying so much lately? I’ve never been a crier, but God is changing my colors here, too, because it’s happening more and more during worship…and He’s teaching me that worship looks like a lot of different things, and most of them aren’t related to music or singing.

I know I’m rambling a little, but this is what fall is: Oh, look at that tree, and that tree, and that one. Look at all the things that are demanding our attention in new ways, all because their colors are changing.

Why do we buy, or borrow, or read all the books? Because we want something inside them to change something inside of us. We know we need our colors to change, too.

We don’t usually mind changing as long as we’re in charge of the process, or it’s gentle enough that we barely notice. But the change we most often need requires our surrender, and that’s when we dig our heels in.

A few years ago we finally made a lot of big changes after months (years) of prayer – we shed some friends, a church, a couple social media accounts – and life has been adjusting with new colors ever since. And in this season, more colors keep changing: Kids keep coming and going, another one is probably moving out next spring, two others need to transition into guardianship…and that’s one of those things where in some ways nothing changes, but in other ways, everything changes. The new colors don’t make sense and we have no idea what they’ll really look like.

Outside, most of the leaves are still hanging on tightly to branches and this is probably the last perfect week of fall before they all let go. We still have a few sunflowers and poppies blooming, and I keep checking to see if any of the ones that bloomed earliest are ready to harvest for seeds yet, but no, they’re still not, even though their petals have been gone for months. They went from enchanting violets and lavenders and crimsons whose bold petals stretched outward in every direction to these compact, reclusive green pods, and nothing to show for the change in color.

Sometimes we go through this process, too, and we wonder what God is doing with us. I used to feel so vibrant and free, and now I don’t know what I’m doing. Am I still the same person, even? Why do I feel less instead of more?

External changes are hard enough, but personal change — like when you know God is calling you higher, closer, humbler, or bolder – is a whole other process of molting and metamorphosis. But who we are hasn’t really changed; we’re just becoming more us as we become more like Him…and still, sometimes we dig in our heels, not sure if we should cooperate. Not sure how it will turn out. Not sure what we’ll have to give up, or what we’ll have to pay.

And sometimes shame and pride come in, and we dig our heels in here, too. I know this isn’t working, but I don’t want to change because that means admitting I’ve been wrong. If I change, people will see the difference between who I’ve been and who I’ve needed to be, and the space between feels embarrassing…so I’d rather just stay here.

To make it harder, some people walk in feigned maturity and make it awkward or difficult for everyone else to grow. I’m talking about the ones who drag us back in shame to our past, or speak dread over our future, and say things like, “Oh, just wait till ______ happens [insert story of martyrdom that demands your reverence to boost the speaker’s ego]. You’ll think differently then.”

These ones did not truly mature past the level they brag about, but stalled out when their insecurities outweighed their surrender. I have a theory that these are the same people who complain about all their responsibilities and never having any free time from the comfort of their easy chair while watching TV in the evenings. (They probably shouldn’t say those things to homeschooling moms who are balancing the phone on one ear while checking math assignments, washing eggs, and stirring dinner on the stove.)

There’s no shame in changing colors and turning in the right direction. Maturity requires humility. Sanctification means we are constantly a work in progress, and it’s okay to be a beautiful mess.

Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.

– 1 Timothy 4:12-15

The only ones who lord it over us are the ones who refused, staying in the old phases, clinging to their old colors and baby fuzz, convincing themselves that to be perpetually in one’s twenties (or thirties, or whatever) is the ideal of happiness because it means there was never anything in them that needed improved upon. And this is why there are so many middle-aged and elderly narcissists (who, ironically, raised younger generations of narcissists, too).

The prodigal wonders, If I change now, will I be ashamed and embarrassed later of who I was, when who I am now becomes who I used to be?

– Oh My Soul

But what an amazing, holy, beautiful thing it is to allow God to change your color. We’re afraid it will take over our safe spaces…and it will. But it’ll be okay. The Lord is a strong tower; we can run to Him and be safe.

We have all these spring chicks who are almost adults now, and none of them resemble what they looked like before their feathers came in. They lost stripes, added speckles, and changed colors all over. Watching them over the summer has been a constant process of re-acquaintance as they’ve changed so fast – Oh, it’s you, Freckles. Last week you were brown with stripes, and now you are fifteen shades of chestnut, copper, and mahogany, with a gorgeous green tail that looks…suspiciously… like a rooster’s.

It turns out he is a rooster, but he’s my favorite and we’re keeping him, so there. He’s ginormous and still growing.

And those tight-fisted green pods of poppies are each growing hundreds of seeds that will reproduce themselves next year. They’ll let go, soon, too – I’ll know when I can see little windows open up at the tops of them that let the wind blow through.

One flower’s worth of lavender or crimson or violet will bear a field’s worth of color. They aren’t dying; we’re not dying. We are reproducing, replicating, propagating, spreading His colors into fields we could never reach now, far into the years ahead.

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do hard things: the Kingdom’s response to ease & apathy

Posted on by October 5, 2023

A few weeks ago in our prayer meeting, an elderly friend quietly said, “The Lord likes bravery, and our willingness to do hard, new things.”

I think she’s right. And we can do hard things. But often, we’d rather not.

do hard things: the Kingdom's response to ease and apathy

For example, raising poultry is a lot harder than just buying eggs at the store once a week. It’s not convenient, but it is ideal, because once you know what goes into your supermarket eggs and meat and how the food supply has been repeatedly attacked in the last few years, you’ll have the motivation to do hard things. (Or at least to start looking for a local egg source.)

But it’s easier not to know, and that’s what we often opt for. Learning is pretty dangerous because it makes us uncomfortable and nudges us toward action we’d rather not participate in.

And we can’t learn everything at once – this is a long journey we’re on, and I’m nowhere close to arriving – but every year we’re learning to do things differently to align more with the values we claim to believe in.

Such as, slavery is wrong. No brainer, right? But when was the last time you (or hey, your church) bought something that was substantially cheaper than the alternative because you didn’t want to pay more? When two almost identical items vary that much in price, it’s usually because one of them was made by someone who didn’t get paid for their labor. If I had a dollar for every time in the last twenty years my kids received slave-made trinkets from their classes at church, I’d have enough money to adopt three more kids.

People need to know. There’s so much we need to know.

We need to know Who we’re dealing with and how He loves us, and how to handle others with care. Those are the basics. But also, we need to know that we can do hard things – because if we’re not willing to do hard things, our basics go nowhere.

And this right here is where the rubber meets the road in the Kingdom: It’s not enough say we value Biblical beliefs if we’re still actually living as our own god and worshipping ease.

It’s a lesson I thought I already knew eleven years ago, until I realized I didn’t. We thought we knew what “hard” was: We had four kids and parenting was hard, we’d been married for 15 years and some of those years were hard. The process of adoption – with all of its paperwork and training and fundraising – was hard.

But is it easier now? Yes.

And also, no.

Sailing a boat across stormy waters is one kind of hard. But stepping out of it and trusting the Lord to defy gravity and hold you on top of it is a whole other thing.

So “hard” is relative, and it’s not what’s really important. What the Lord is looking for is our willingness to go to the next level, to surrender and trust Him in a new way, to obey Him in something that requires His intervention and not just our own ability.

Will we mess up? Will we make mistakes? Absolutely, no doubt. But is the Lord unaware of our imperfections and efforts when He calls us? Nope. He knows and is not surprised; He’s not afraid of us making Him look bad. And if we’re honest, we’re not afraid of that, either. We’re afraid we’ll make ourselves look bad.

When Peter risked the ocean, he didn’t care what the guys in the boat thought; His connection with Jesus is what both compelled and allowed him to walk on water. But when Jesus becomes less important than anything or anyone else, we make mistakes and lose our focus, and this is when we start to sink. Ask me how I know.

If we only know Jesus as our savior but not also as our Lord, we won’t step out of the boat. And maybe that’s a good thing because we can’t survive the water without Him.

Are we willing to go to the next level and obey Him in whatever hard thing He’s calling us to next? Will we surrender our spending habits and lifestyles? Will we let go of our insecurities and ignorance-is-bliss mentality?

But if I _____ (shop elsewhere, adopt a child, quit my job, research that issue, stop living with my boyfriend, quit that habit, homeschool my kids, change my business, have that hard conversation, let go of unforgiveness, whatever) I don’t know what will happen. I don’t have the money. What will people think of me?

The Lord is trying to bring us out of our old confinements and inabilities into a broader space where we live surrendered to Him. It’s a place where we’re bound by love, and therefore, free.

He tried to do it with the Israelites, and when discomfort hit, they dug in their heels just like we do:

And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? It is no place for grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink.

– Numbers 20:5

There is no Starbucks, no Walmart, no cheap poison from McDonalds.

Absolute trust in His love for us is the most critical choice we make, because life doesn’t always make sense. We forfeit control outside the comfort zone where everything operates by a different set of rules. And that supernatural trust is a secure place – Jesus is our security and stability outside the comfort zone, on the water – but the minute we look back to the boat (or the bank account, or the old habits, or anything else) for security, we expose ourselves to sinking.

But we were made to risk the ocean, and walk on water.

It’s not enough to just be on the right side. The conservative patriot who winks at porn is just as compromised as the liberal who advocates for abortion, regardless of whether or not they attend church every Sunday. The one who considers themselves a great warrior or influencer in these days while living in impurity has nothing on the person who lives in quiet, bold alignment with the Spirit, listening and interceding, confident and unassuming in the dunamis the Holy Spirit offers.

When you’re living fully surrendered, the “normal Christians” around you will wonder at your life just as much as those who don’t know Jesus.

Maybe our family wasn’t wrong. Maybe families are supposed to take on huge challenges and come to the end of themselves and learn to trust God for radical healing and restoration. Maybe that’s what’s supposed to be normal, rather than the comfortable, spacious lifestyle that lets us be the center of our own universe.

– Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom’s Memoir on Sinking and Sanctification

Living in surrender means we no longer default to convenience. We surrender to living inconveniently because that means living in power, because our bodies are a temple, because our money and time and talents are His, and we’re stewards of the King. Our lives are lived to build the Kingdom, not the enemy’s platform. This is our spiritual act of worship.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

– Romans 12:1-2

We talk about expanding the Kingdom, but if we live to pad our comfort zone – shunning the inconvenient and ignoring the uncomfortable and refusing His sanctifying work in us – we’re merely inoculating others from the Kingdom rather than bringing them into it.

The next generation inherits what the first generation backed out of. They will inherit the promise, but they will also have to fight the battles that should have already been won by the previous generation that neglected to walk in the promise.

So let’s not back out of this.

Kingdom Culture ought to be standard Christianity. Radical surrender, service, healings, joy, peace, and exploits ought to be our norm, not the extreme fringe.

Will we turn down a life fit for glossy magazine pages in favor of a life of transparency? What if we traded our shiny packaging for rough brown paper, tied with grace?

– Risk the Ocean

There’s room for each of us to grow, and Jesus knows our weakness and our desire to do better. Like with Peter, He asks us, Why did you doubt? Don’t you know that I’ve got this? Don’t you know that I’ve got you?

Surrender prevents our sinking. He meets us in mercy, reaching out to us, and holding our hands as we walk back to the boat together.

______

If you’d like to read my story of sinking and sanctification, Risk the Ocean is now available. You can buy it directly from us, or find it on Amazon, or get it anywhere books are sold.

Here are part one and part two of this series.

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bricks without straw: the struggle that leads to freedom

Posted on by June 21, 2023

You wouldn’t think gardening could make you that sore. You pull out seed packets, you put seeds in the dirt, you water.

But no, it’s not that simple because you actually have to move a lot of that dirt and water. Pots go here, pots go there. All the pots need filled with dirt and then you realize, Wait, that spot looks funny. So you go back to rearranging.

A bench is in the way, in the prime real estate of the porch’s sunny south side. You try moving it but no, BIG nope, that’s going to hurt tomorrow. So your husband comes and together you pivot (“PIVOT!” yes, I was thinking that, too) to the other side of the deck. Ahhh, done.

But no, not so fast, because there’s that empty space where the bench was, and you still need to put pots there. Drat.

And that’s how it goes.

bricks without straw: the struggle that leads to freedom

That night in the shower as I scrubbed the dirt off my feet I found a particularly dark spot under all of it, and rubbed at it. Ew, a blister? No, different texture, not rubbing off. Kind of gummy. Ah, tree sap. Gross.

This is how we cultivate life: Hands in the dirt, doing the work, asking for help, making a lot of turns and finding new perspectives, feeling the burn and ache of too much movement when we try too much on our own, and in the end, we still have to trust God for the harvest because we don’t control the weather or what goes on underground. And even if we fence what we can, there are still other critters out there who want to steal the harvest.

(Peter Rabbit, I’m looking at you.)

It’s raining so we are doing inside-the-house things, and I tried something new today: recording audio downstairs. It’s still empty where Iree moved out; we haven’t rearranged rooms yet, and I thought it would be quieter in the basement. Less traffic, less airplane noise.

WHAT WAS I THINKING.

Quail roosters crowing in the bathroom overhead. The furnace and water softener kicking on. And then, so help me, someone flushed the toilet.

(“…John seventeen says, All mine are yours, and–” BA-WOOSH, gurglegurgle pflalbghghghrrr…)

The new quail are almost fully grown, so they will quiet down soon. Our oldest son came over the other day and asked why the males crow so much, and I told him it’s because they feel safe – they can make noise because they know they’re not in danger. When they go outside, they don’t crow as much.

And, well…when they’re in the freezer, they’re absolutely silent.

We make more noise and move more freely when we feel safe, too. We try new things, have room for mistakes, we try again, and get better. We tend to ask for help from people we trust and we get comfortable with the tasks we do over and over again.

And then something changes suddenly: A financial challenge, or a health issue, or a move, or a basic routine gets rearranged, and we’re like…Ugh, now I have to figure this out all over again.

I like (no, love – like, looooove) routines and predictability. I prefer flexible structure with just enough variety to keep life interesting. I like reading new books but I want to choose which ones they are. I want to learn new things, but do it on my own timeline and with my own curriculum.

And to some extent the Lord allows it, but the last few several dozen years have brought plenty of surprises to keep us on our toes and on our knees, trusting Him for what we needed as life shifted under and around us. We haven’t wanted to learn certain things that He’s put in our way. I was happy with the worn trails I was used to, where I knew all the turns and risings and places where you had to step over tree roots that crept onto the path.

But He is constantly forcing us to branch out into new territory. There have been so many times I felt suddenly lost in unfamiliar ground, unsure of how to go on, or how to do what He was calling us to. I have often felt like we were making bricks without straw, and we are there again in this season.

So I’m reading Exodus 5, where the Israelites really had to make bricks without straw.

Or, not without straw, but it was no longer just given to them. They had to go find it themselves. It was punishment from Pharoah – and not just punishment, but it came as a result of Moses obeying God and telling Pharoah to let the Israelites go.

Let’s go back a little bit, because this is often our life, too:

Then Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the people of Israel. Aaron spoke all the words that the Lord had spoken to Moses and did the signs in the sight of the people. And the people believed; and when they heard that the Lord had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshiped.

– Exodus 4:29-31

Then Moses and Aaron went to Pharoah, gave him the message, and he said, No, BIG nope, you’ve clearly got too much time on your hands. Let’s make things more difficult for you.

So, to sum up:

We hear God, we do what He says, we feel hopeful about the future, and wham, the hammer drops. THANKS A LOT.

Is this life, though? We try new things in obedience and they don’t seem to work out. Or they get harder, or the circumstances become worse, or the whole situation reveals itself to be more complicated than you realized in the beginning, and if you knew how complicated it was going to be you wouldn’t have taken it on in the first place and that’s probably why God didn’t tell you…because he was protecting you from disobedience.

But maybe things are working out…they’re just still working out.

Because here’s the part of this story that struck me:

[Pharoah said] “Go and get your straw yourselves wherever you can find it, but your work will not be reduced in the least.” So the people were scattered throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.

– Exodus 5:11-12

They still had what they needed; it just wasn’t handed to them anymore. Suddenly they had the freedom to find it for themselves. The middle man was eliminated. They could get the straw on their own without the process being controlled by someone else. And that’s significant, because straw comes from grain, which is food for them and their livestock.

Yes, it was more work. Yes, it seemed impossible. No, they would never have done it if they hadn’t been forced to. But do you see what happened here?

The Lord is preparing them to be delivered. They are forced to be resourceful. They have to get to know the land around them.

Because the Exodus is coming.

How many things have you done in the last year or so that you never would’ve taken on if you didn’t feel compelled to? I can think of a zillion things – well, at least seven – that I could’ve easily left on my “someday” list. (Or, honestly? My “never in million years” list.)

For example, I love the chickens, but I probably wouldn’t have chosen to have two coops full of them. And the quail? No way. Also, I never would’ve pursued several business skills we’ve had to figure out and push through. And there are so many things I’ve learned about our government and systemic corruption and history that I was happier not knowing.

But the Lord has continued to say, Dig deeper. Look further. Try this. Get ready for that. Read about this. You need to know the land. This is a time to run faster than you think you can – and trust Me, you’ll be glad you did.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

– 1 John 4:18

When obedience leads to more work, it feels like punishment because we aren’t seeing the promise on the other side of it yet. But the ache and the curveball and the new endeavors aren’t punishment; they’re growing strength. It’s upgrade.

It’s actually preparation for promotion, because God is getting us ready for freedom.

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