For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
While many people make resolutions at the beginning of each year, I usually do not. Instead, I tend decide what I would like to change at certain stages of my life. For instance, at forty years old, I was pregnant with our one and only child. I obviously had no particular goals other than enjoying her babyhood and my motherhood. That was a very welcomed, big change!
Yesterday I turned fifty. After having so many birthdays, the fanfare is not necessary for me. It is just another day, marking another year. I suppose it is an accomplishment I have lived this long, but it seems that many others do so what it so significant in that? You know, we have so many other things of greater interest to me that I had forgotten until my daughter asked me the date so she could put it on her math paper. It was not a special day, really. We all did the normal things. I prepared outgrown clothes for a consignment sale and my husband worked at the office until it was bedtime for the Princess. Although my husband did present me with brownies on his arrival—I do have a thing for brownies and I am pretty easy to please that way!
My husband and I both have felt a leading to become self-sufficient. This feels so much like when we sold our lovely conversion van and bought the mini-van. We did not know it then, but within a month he lost his job and that worked out perfectly to help us financially get through that time. So, I am a little anxious about what this might mean about our future, but I also know that God's leading on that made it all work out, so this will work out as well.
You see, when my husband and I moved here all we wanted was a house we could afford having come from a mobile home and we prayed for the house and area for two years, then on our tenth year anniversary, he was told either he was fired tomorrow or he would agree to moved to an undermanned city within a month. You can imagine that our anniversary dinner was not exactly as romantic and carefree as we hoped it would be, but we finally recognized it as the answer to our prayers.
Life is not easy all the time, but I believe that God does grant us the things we really want. (Or is it that He places the desire in us the things He wishes to give? Always boggles my mind that.) My husband and I have wanted some land, not a lot of land, but about ten acres to have a sufficient lifestyle and the money is just not here. We would like to have a large garden, meat and milking goats, chickens or ducks for eggs mostly, and at least one horse for the Princess.
We have been desiring those things, but for the last few years we have wondering if we getting to the age that it would not be feasible. Still, I have been praying about this, the Lord has been telling me to do with what we have. Not just be happy where we are, but more of work with what we have as far as we are able. It has been very strong all this summer. To be honest, why would He provide us with more when we have not been making use of what He has given us so far?
Now that the Princess is a pretty responsible nine-year-old and able to help with so many things and the Lord seems to be guiding us, my husband and I have felt that it is time to make a few changes. We will be using our yard more for food gardens, but we do also need a couple of barn cats to keep the squirrels from stealing so much. We did not even get one ripe peach off our tree this year and they are just as bad with tomatoes! I am praying that the Lord will provide the right cats, good hunters who will bond with us well and that our dog will stop chasing cats, or at least will not chase these cats. Starting with kittens might be the best way to go, but we are waiting for the Lord to provide them. Shelters here have $100 or more adoption fees per cat!
Since we cannot raise our own livestock, my husband decided that it was time he did something he has always wanted to do. He will be hunting for deer. He hardly ever had weekends off before and the hunters he knew never had the same weekends off he did. All that has changed and this year land to lease for hunting became available quite late before the season, so he got a few friends together to form a club and won the bid on a piece of land that has good deer activity. Actually, they raised the hunting limits this year because the deer population is quite high. There are no guarantees with hunting, but I believe the Lord has blessed this as well.
We have our work cut out for us in the months ahead and for me it just all seems to fall into place. Since the fast—I just have to say again what a blessing that was to us personally—my husband and I have a dream and a united purpose, we have stronger, hardier bodies to do the extra labor (Such a huge difference there, I cannot tell you!), and many other resources that just seem to be making it happen within our means, even though we are stretched pretty thin financially right now. My Lord is so good!
~ My Lord, thank you for providing what we desire and reminding us that we must work with what we have and giving us the blessing of health to be able to do it all. ~
