Bon Voyage!

Yes, indeed. The long awaited journey will begin on Monday, September 9th at approximately 8 p.m. when we soar away on a plane bound for Heathrow airport across the Atlantic. Travellers will include my brother Galen, my dear friend Victoria and me. This will be by far the most extensive trip I have taken away from the farm and my family, as well as my first trip outside the US of A. The furthest I've been away from home was in Hawaii 4 years ago (an adventure chronicled here) which, though quite far away, still counts as the US.

Anyhow, thanks to Victoria's painstaking planning and organization abilities (for which I am exceedingly grateful) we have a fantastic itinerary prepared that includes everything we want to do. Our main base will be London, England and the surrounding environs with a weekend in Scotland and a weekend in Paris to boot.

In addition to her superior planning skills, I am also thankful that Victoria is fluent in French. From what I have heard, English speakers are not as common in Paris as you might suppose. I speak a little, about enough to order myself a croissant and tell someone to buzz off. 

Such useful phrases.

Most importantly, I am coming into this trip with a new lesson I've been learning of late, and that lesson is this:

We can be as content as we make our minds up to be. 

Being content is a choice. 

"This is the day which the Lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad in it" 
(Psalm 118:24)

So, even if

we miss a train or connection,
something  is closed that we were planning on visiting,
it rains profusely,
we are pick-pocketed*
things aren't as we thought they'd be.....

*I am, however, the proud owner of a fancy schmancy messenger bag that is, by all accounts, thieve-proof. Bring it, pickpockets. Also, it is quite unfortunate that I can't bring along CJ, so I'll be on my own with regards to that front.
(CJ = Calamity Jane, my .380 Sig Sauer)

As with life in general, it's really all about enjoying every moment and the little things, even if things don't go exactly as planned. 

Taking joy in sitting a little cafe sipping tea. 
Watching the little british grandma walk down the street with her bag of groceries. 
Listening to the lilt of the British accents. 
Walking the streets of Edinburgh.

If we are taking in and are thankful for the "little things" that we know for sure we will see and experience, how much more so we going to appreciate the grand cathedrals, castles, artwork, and architecture that we have planned to take in. I am hoping to journal a great deal and blog some when I can, as I love writing and this is a great trip to indulge myself. :) This is, in part, the reason for this post. I will be chronicling our adventures on the 18 day trip right here on my blog. 

I have found that keeping a written record is such a wonderful way of using the medium of words to lock away memories and experiences so they can be savored and re-lived later on.
However, being in the possession of journals from my childhood remind me that some memories are of such a nature that we don't want to remember them.

Spilling a drink at a manners class on the instructor's daughter. That time when I was 8 years old and I experienced a wardrobe malfunction involving a two piece swimsuit and a diving board. Getting stuck in Grandma's laundry hamper and almost losing my finger.

You get the idea. Of course, I can laugh at such stories now, but at the time it was a whole different story.

Still, I'm a firm believer in journalling. The ability to be able to look back on events to see the Lord's faithfulness outweighs any obstacle and is the primary benefit.

So, now onto some pictures of the places that we'll be visiting, Lord willing.

         
                                        Edinburgh, Scotland. They have CASTLES! :)

                                                                 Scottish highlands

                                                                       The Louvre

                                                                    Bath, England

                                                                  St. Giles Cathedral
                                     

                                                  Hastings Battlfield and Battle Abbey.
                                                           Normans or Saxons? :)

                                                              And, of course, PARIS!

Stay tuned!

(even better) Good News!

I was thinking about the subject of "holidays" early this morning in that half sleep, half awakeness that sometime accompanies early morning. I realized that there is a common thread running through all holidays worth celebrating, and that thread is thankfulness.

The first and obvious display of this commonality is Thanksgiving, in which we give thanks to God for everything he has bestowed upon us. We give thanks for our parents on Mother’s Day and Fathers day. We give thanks for our country and the freedoms we enjoy on the Fourth of July.  At Christmas, we celebrate and give thanks for the indescribably great gift of God’s son coming to earth as a human.

Easter (or Resurrection day, depending on your preference for the importance of names) is the time when we give thanks for God’s son Jesus dying on the cross, bearing the sins of the whole world.

I think that far too often in our nation we reduce and dilute the richness of the story of the Passion. When we are asked for the reason for Easter we parrot our scripted reply of “Jesus died for my sins, paid my debt, and I can be with Him heaven when I die.” While perfectly correct and full of truth, it is only part of the story. There is even more that has been done for us! I know that I forget and need to be reminded.

Let’s go back to the fall.

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.” G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

This is an interesting viewpoint on the Fall. Since that time when the “actors and stage managers made a mess of things,” we have all become sinners. Not just those who, because of our sanitized Christianity, we deem worthy of bearing an emblemized title of SINNER written in red across their shirt. We have ALL, at one time or another, sinned and fallen far short of the tall measuring stick of the law. And as it says if James 2:10, “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”

Want to try to keep the hundreds and perhaps thousands of laws in the old testament? Let’s say you decide to “keep the Sabbath.” What would that look like? A mere cursory look over the Old testament will prove the hundreds of laws necessary to properly keep the Sabbath. It is simply not an option to pick and choose the easier Sabbath laws and leave the others.

"Keeping the Sabbath" is not an isolated law. They’re all chained together to make The Old Testament Law: the laws of purification, sacrifice, stoning adulterers, and cleanliness. You can’t pick and choose one over the other like a salad bar. It’s like a chain-you break a link and the chain is rendered nonfunctional. 

Thanks to Jesus and His work, we no longer have to live under the heavy weight of the law.

 Jesus came to fulfill the law and the prophets. We are no longer under the letter of the law, but under grace. The law does not cease to exist, but it ceases to exist as it applies to me, a believer in Christ trusting in him alone for my Righteousness, not in how I’m doing compared to the law, which is impossible for me to fulfill. I am Righteous because of Jesus’ work on the cross and for believing on his name, regardless of how much I have performed or marked off “religious checklist.” There is great rest and freedom in trusting in God and not our feeble works.

Allow me to quote Chesterton once again. He and I go way back…

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

 I think the Old Testament was a bit like this. In hindsight, it looked brutal, bloody and barbaric. It had a purpose, fulfilled it, and along came Jesus and now we are on to better things: LIFE IN CHRIST. We have “gotten round the front,” so to speak.

To illustrate the point of the “old” law no longer applying to us as believers, for a moment let’s imagine you are in a grade school, 8^th grade. It comes to the end of the school year and you graduate from the 8^th grade into the 9^th grade. You move to a new place, a new school, new jurisdictions, and new people. It is similar to the old school you attended in some ways and different in others.

Has the 8th grade ceased to exist? No. It’s still there. You can drive by and see the building. But it has ceased to exist as it applies to you. You are in the 9^th grade now, free from the constraints and restrictions of the 8th grade. This analogy is not perfect (find one that is!) but it does illustrate the point that we are graduated out of the Old Testament and Old Testament Laws into the New Convenant in Jesus’ blood. The old laws have not ceased to exist, but they do not apply to us any longer because we have “graduated” from that system because of the blood of Jesus.

For sin shall not have dominion over you: for you are not under the law, but under grace. Romans 6:14

The good news is that Jesus gives us power over sin NOW. Not in future when we will be with him in glory, but NOW.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him,

knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more.

Death no longer has dominion over Him.

For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all;

but the life that He lives, He lives to God.

Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:8-11

 “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

Romans 6:1-4

I think that Satan likes us to keep our head in the clouds, literally. He wants us to dream of what’s to come and not realize the truth we can be living NOW. I find this happening  to me more often than it should. I need these truth filled verses ever before me!

Romans 6:21-23

What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.  But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is a freedom that I strive to remind myself of every day, not just on a day that has been qualified for “holiday status” in this nation.

“Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord does not count against them
and in whose spirit is no deceit.”

Psalm 32:1-2

We are blessed! Let’s reflect on that fact today and every day.

Girl's Work

I wrote this short post last fall for our farm blog ( http://www.faithmtnfarm.com/blog/ )and I thought it worth re-posting on this, my somewhat neglected personal blog.



I have observed that girls, by their nature and talents, usually carry their duties out in the home and surrounding environs, involving themselves in pursuits that are rightly theirs to do. We enjoy this “women’s work” and find great solace in carrying out the duties given us, the duties such as preparing meals, beautifying the home, teaching children, pursing various handicraft skills, shopping for the home, ordering the days, and creating various things.

Most females are not interested in taking part in “Men’s work,” things such as mowing the lawn, building things, operating power equipment, shooting guns, splitting wood,etc.  However, I happen to believe that it is not only beneficial for ladies to learn skills that are normally performed by men, it is very enjoyable. For one thing, I found it makes you appreciate and empathize with the work your brother or father or husband toils through each week.  Another, it is a wonderful change of pace from our usual sphere of work.

This past week I made good on a promise to do a bit of woodsplitting with my brother. Remembering how much I enjoyed splitting wood as a child was one of the motivations for this promise. It proved just as enjoyable as it had been when I was young. We split the logs until our splitter ran out of fuel, then he informed me that now I could pick up what logs I could and place them near the splitter for the next workday. Sullivan then left to do someother thing, and I began scouring for logs I could move. I came upon four gigantic ones, each weighing at least 85 pounds apiece. Thinking I couldn’t possibly move those, I walked on until I spotted the sledgehammer and wedge sitting a few yards away. Immediately I was intrigued. Mimicking what I had seen my brothers do, I placed the wedge in a groove in the wood and started by hammering it gently with the sledgehammer to keep it from falling over and then I started hammering in earnest.  After several hits from the sledgehammer, the wedge really began sinking into the wood. Soon, across the stillness of the field, I heard a crackling sound that was soft at first, but grew into a loud symphony of crackling. Seeing the end was near and breathless with delight at my success, I kept hammering furiously.Then, with a loud THWACK the log split in half and splattered in the mud nearby. I was hooked.  I did the same to the 3 other logs, the last one taking the longest to split since it was a hardwood log. At one point I was so engrossed in my project I hardly even noticed several cars with their drivers ogling me as they rode by. What I sight I must have been! Muddy all over, red faced, wild hair, and wielding a sledgehammer with the determinedness of a madwoman. I did not care in the least, for I was having too much fun! After the logs were all split into a size I could carry, I took them to the splitter one by one. It started to rain as I was carrying the last log, and thus ended my day on the job.

 

It goes both ways. Put a man on laundry duty for a day and expect them to stand in awe for the next week of every shirt that miraculously appears, perfectly folded and pressed, in their drawer. Put a girl on wood splitting duty for the day and she will appreciate each piece of wood put into the fire for warmth. Not only that, but you may have to fight for the possession of that wedge and sledgehammer.

New Website

Well, it's done!
What, you might ask?
Our brand new website!
New, improved and spiffy! Place your orders for Honey and Granola now, and we can ship to anywhere!
Well....
Unless you live in Timbuktu. Even then, we may be able to arrange something. A Camel, perhaps?

Check it out:
www.faithmtnfarm.com

Cheers!
Margaret

Painting with Little Ones

Today when I was helping my younger brothers and sisters paint rocks, (one of their favorite pastimes)  I realized that an old styrofoam egg carton makes a fantastic paint tray! Quick, convenient, and, best of all, disposable. I definitely dislike rinsing out those plastic cartons of the (usually dried!) paint and ruining my nice clean sink. :)

Singles and Valentine's Day-An Exhortation

 I wrote this on the occasion of Valentine's Day 2012.

Ah, Valentine’s Day, we meet again. Hearts in various shades of pink and red brighten the hallmark aisle and cheap boxed chocolates line the aisles of the stores. The jewelry stores are quite busy. Cupid has decided to upgrade to an AK-47 this year and gleefully fires his shots with deadly accuracy and astonishing rapidity.

One might suppose that, being single, my day would somehow be lacking in those elements we consider essential to a “good” Valentine ’s Day, things like receiving flowers, jewelry, or a note from that special someone.

I have found that those pleasantries and niceties, good as they are, are neither essential nor necessary to have a good Valentine ’s Day. You see, I am a Christian. I happen to believe that there is a person who loves me above and beyond much more than anyone on this earth will ever come close to. Not love in the sense we sometimes use it; casually, almost degrading the word by how often and nonchalantly we use it (i.e. I love that new dress! It is sooo cute! I loved that chocolate! )  Yes, how did you guess those were direct quotations from my own life?

You see, God loves us. He loves us, not as we claim to love that new dress that will soon lose its appeal, or the chocolate that will soon be gone, but LOVES us, truly, completely, even when we don’t return it or push it out of the way with disgust  like a love note from someone we don’t esteem.  It even says in Zephaniah 3:17 “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” It says He will quiet me with His love. In another translation it reads that He will “quiet ALL our fears” with his love. Better and better!  That doesn’t leave any room for our voices or minds clamoring for something more! God, help us to fully realize this great love!

Those of us who think that we must, at all costs, have a husband or wife to make us “complete” are deceived. Scripture does make it quite clear that we are already complete in Him! 2 Peter 1:3 declares that “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence…”  That sounds pretty clear to me! How about Colossians 2:10? “And you are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.”
Speaking to my brothers and sisters in Christ who are single, how can we, who profess to believe God created this world and everything in it and that He sent His son to suffer and die for our wrongs, fail to trust and believe God in this matter of finding someone to spend the rest of our lives with? Do we think he would have any trouble whatsoever orchestrating a love story that not only provides us with a husband or wife, but glorifies and exalts his name through it all? Of course he wouldn’t. His timing is perfect. He wants what is best for us!

Is this collection of rambles somehow a rant against those married or in a relationship? Absolutely not! All of us believers, regardless of our age or marital status, should seek to develop a deeper relationship with God and to believe fully in His great love for us.

So, speaking to singles again, this Valentine’s Day, or ANY day when you are tempted to throw a pity party for one and feel “less-than” or that you are “missing out” because you are not currently in a relationship, as a Christian, don’t forget that you ARE in a relationship, whether you realize it or not, of the most meaningful kind. Make it count. Build it strong.

One last thing: let God be the author of your love story. Don’t vie for being the co-author or editor. Give it all over to Him. Let him write it all. If you flip through the bible, you’ll quickly see- He’s the best author and storyteller of all time.

Chronicles of a Kitchen Alchemist, Part 1

Recently, I caved and purchased this book. I use the term 'caved' because I had been afraid that if I bought this particular cookbook I would go a little nuts and become totally consumed with all the incredible possibilities for healthy recipes.

Since getting the book, I have made butter, whey, cream cheese, soaked blueberry muffins, and Kimchi. I have been amazed at the ease and simplicity with which these formerly formidable soaked and fermented foods came together.

This afternoon, I made Korean Sauerkraut, or 'Kimchi' as it is called there. I have never made anything like this, and this being my first foray into the world of fermented vegetables, I thought it necessary to chronicle my experience here.

For a little background, here is an excerpt from Nourishing Traditions (by Sally Fallon) about fermented fruits and vegetables-

"The ancient Greeks understood that important chemical changes took place during this type of fermentation. Their name for this change was "alchemy." Like the fermentation of dairy products, preservation of vegetables and fruits by the process of lacto-fermentation has numerous advantages beyond those of simple preservation. The proliferation of lactobacilli in fermented vegetables enhances their digestibility and increases vitamin levels. These beneficial organisms produce numerous helpful enzymes as well as antibiotic and anticarcinogenic substances. Their main by-product, lactic acid, not only keeps vegetables and fruits in a state of perfect preservation but also promotes the growth of healthy flora throughout the intestine. Other alchemical by-products include hydrogen peroxide and small amounts of benzoic acid."

Does this give me license to call myself an alchemist? I think I shall.

"Lacto-fermented condiments are easy to make. Fruits and vegetables are first washed and cut up, mixed with salt and herbs or spices and then pounded briefly to release juices. They are then pressed into an air tight container. Salt inhibits putrefying bacteria for several days until enough lactic acid is produced to preserve the vegetables for many months. The amount of salt can be reduced or even eliminated if whey is added to the pickling solution. Rich in lactic acid and lactic-acid-producing bacteria, whey acts as an inoculant, reducing the time needed for sufficient lactic acid to be produced to ensure preservation. Use of whey will result in consistently successful pickling; it is essential for pickling fruits. During the first few days of fermentation, the vegetables are kept at room temperature; afterwards, they must be placed in a cool, dark place for long-term preservation."
(all italicized text from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon)

The ready-to-ferment product!

Korean Sauerkraut, or 'Kimchi'

(from Nourishing Traditions)

makes 2 quarts

1 head Napa cabbage, cored and shredded
1 bunch of green onions, chopped
1 cup carrots, grated
1/2 cup daikon radish, grated
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1/2 teaspoon dried chili flakes
1 tablespoon sea salt
4 tablespoons whey* (or use additional 1 T salt instead)

Place vegetables, ginger, red chili flakes, salt and whey in a bowl and pound it with a wooden pounder or a meat hammer to release juices. Place them in two quart sized glass jars and press down firmly until all the juices come up to the top and cover the vegetables. The top of the vegetables should be at least an inch from the top of the jar. Cover tightly and keep at room temperature for about 3 days at which time you can put it in the fridge or cold storage.

Or, you can store the kimchi in your dungeon if you have one handy.

What, you don't have a dungeon?! Oh, how much you miss.....

While I was making this recipe, I saw that it called for using a meat hammer or wooden pounder to help the mixture get juicy. I had neither on hand, and so I went ahead and used the remnant of the daikon radish (which was at least 20'' long and 3'' in diameter) to pound it with. Yes, I just said to mash your vegetables with a vegetable. But, it works!

Well, there are some who do not appreciate my efforts.....

but hey, that leaves more for the rest of us!

Stay tuned for part 2, in which I shall attempt a %100 Whole Wheat yeast-less sourdough bread.