The Suburban was in the shop for repairs again. I think it must be worn out from hauling us all over the place. Naddy and I walked around town a bit while we waited for the mechanic to finish. We stopped at the Bolivar town well and learned that we weren't the first settlers in these parts after all.

For Rest the Night

God, that madest earth and heaven,
darkness and light;
Who the day for toil has given,
for rest the night.
May thine angel-guards defend us,
Slumber sweet thy mercy send us;
Holy dreams and hopes attend us,
this live-long night.
Guard us waking, guard us sleeping;
And when we die,
May we in Thy mighty keeping
all peaceful lie.
When the last dread call shall wake us,
Do not, Thou, our God, forsake us,
But to reign in glory take us,
with Thee on high.

This is a hymn we sing each night at bedtime. When the boys are all in their bunks, everyone gathers and we offer the words as a prayer to God. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be sung softly, but boyish enthusiasm trumps that sort of thing. When the boys know a song, they like to sing it somewhere near the top of the lungs.

One of the things that struck me about the words is the assumption that God, through the creation, orders our time; day is for work, night is for rest. This seems simple enough, but what do we see all around us but people trying to deny this pattern?

The most glaring example is the growing number of all night stores, but the pioneer in this foolishness is Las Vegas. I can’t tell you how much I hate that place. I used to have to travel there a couple of times a year for trade shows. All my traveling companions would get excited about this, but I hated it. I would rather be sealed inside a bass drum than be in a casino. I think I would rather hear rappers than all the bing, bing, toot, boink wretched cacophonic disorienting racket. As I am painfully aware, casinos are also designed to make it hard for you to find the door. To me a casino is like a foretaste, a bitter gumdrop of hell in the middle of the tongue.

But the worst thing about Las Vegas is that it never rests. The four beasts in revelation were created so that "they rest not day and night," but that’s not how we were made. The creation gives all men a pattern that shows us when it’s time to cease from our work. Before light bulbs (I’m ok with light bulbs) people who refused to respect the sun’s strict enforcement of ‘lights out’ probably had painful accidents and bumps on the head to help them learn to cease from their labors. We, on the other hand have overcome this deficiency in God’s order and have instituted the 24/7 culture.

First restaurants. For a while it was just Denny’s. Someone had to feed the cops. Then gas stations. Ok, no biggy. Then more restaurants and convenience stores. Grocery Stores. Auto Parts Stores. Wal Mart. Home Depot. Where does it end? How about PetSmart, or Bed, Bath & Beyond. Whatever your little heart desires, whenever your little heart desires it.

We can tell we are in trouble when the reaction to this is all about our freedom to live like this. We worry that someone might be trying to make us go to bed, and (stomp) we are big enough to stay up late if we want to. We make objections: What about policemen, do we want all of them to sleep at night? Doctors? Whaddaboudit? We act like we don’t know that the reason policemen don’t get to sleep at night is because a certain type of person is notorious for not sleeping at night. Doctors also get a good deal of their nighttime business from folks who should’ve been in bed, rather than drunk on a highway after midnight.

Not that I have excelled in this myself, as you know if you look at the time stamps on some of my posts. I have a night owl tendency that I am increasingly uncomfortable with. It just doesn’t seem wise, thrifty, or healthy. Lack of rest at night is listed among the sufferings of Job and the vanities of Solomon. So I am not preaching to the choir, I am preaching in an echo chamber. Nor have I modeled submission to sunset for my progeny, some of whom have emulated my late night tendencies. Of course, this makes also for late sleeping, which, I’m sure you all agree, is a distinctly un-agrarian thing. So you can imaging how gratified I was by this, photographic proof that my bad example may not carry the day (or should that be the night?).

Preliminary Garden Plans

I took all of the seed packets we bought and added up the area required to plant everything based on plant and row spacing, and it came out to a little over 2000 square feet. It's probably too big, we'll have to see how it goes. The most we ever gardened in Flagstaff was about 1500 square feet, but that was a simpler garden, lots of beans and squash, and I broke the ground with a tiller over the space of three years.

Sue would like some of this garden space in close to the house, but most of it needs to go out farther where we have more room. We're talking about what to do about the chickens, since we like giving them the run of the place. I built an OK chicken tractor thing for them, but right now they only use it to roost at night. They seem like they are having a jolly good time scratching around. But we're thinking they'll probably be hard on the garden if we don't fence them out.

Our seeds are from Seedsavers, but we'll pick just a few things to attempt seed saving on. I'll probably will try corn, after listening to the Northern Farmer on the Plain Talk recording. I really enjoyed that conversation, and I'm giving it a replay. It's like a bit of Minnesota right here in Missouri.

I've got tommorrow off from work. I've got so many things I could do, and need to do around here, that it makes my head swim.

Wanderings End?

The late Nineties might seem a funny place to start the last installment of my wandering series, but I think that the build-up to Y2K resulted in a lot of back to the land dreams. Funny thing was, we were already on the land, even if it was just our one acre north of Flagstaff. Many people first encountered the writings of Gary North during this time, as he was one of the alarm ringers. One among many, I might add. I had been reading Gary North since the early eighties on a variety of topics. Additionally, his publishing ministry put many influential books in my hands, books which radically re-shaped my theology. As a prophet he was flawed, however. North had been wrong on a number of previous predictions, most notably for me, the upward price trend of precious metals. But he still had a lot of credibility and when he talked the Y2K talk, I took it seriously.

More about those days in another post, but we got ourselves a bunch of 5 gallon food grade pails and lids, and filled them with flour, corn, beans, and rice. We rounded out the interim supply with oil, sugar, salt and what all I don’t remember. Like a lot of other folks, we relished (maybe ignorantly) the possibility of a great adventure. By the time 1999 rolled around we had been on the Y2K bandwagon for a couple of years and had recruited some other folks as well. By then I was starting to think (not that I really knew) that the whole thing was probably going to amount to nothing. No problem, though, we had plenty of cheap food. Those beans are getting tough, but enough time in the pressure cooker takes care of them.

Anyway, some other issues were taking the front seat, namely that the adoption of a foster child in a smallish place like Flagstaff made us want to put some distance between us and the birth parent. I can’t go into it, but trust me, generally the people who lose custody of their children do not think, or care, about their children like the readers of this blog. If CPS took your kids and all you had to do to get them back was take some stupid parenting classes, pass drug tests, and show up for visits, do you think you could succeed?

We’d had the idea to leave Northern Arizona for many years, and I won’t defend our desire, since you’ve read the earlier stuff, you know that transience is deeply rooted in me. We figured on heading for Idaho, and were just waiting for the adoption decree, which, at that time took about three years. We could’ve moved and taken Joshua with us before the decree, but then we would have had a much more complicated process involving Idaho and Arizona. We decided to move to Phoenix and wait, which we did in August of ‘99. Definitely not your Y2K wisdom.

Which brings me to the point or at least a point. The same optimism which allowed us to move to Phoenix in spite of our fears, allowed us to leave it, ramble around in a travel trailer and eventually land on our little farm in Missouri. It might be stupidity, but it’s also possible that I worship a God who loves and desires good for His people. Somewhere in the middle of my Y2K preparations, I decided fear was a terrible way to live, and made no sense for a Christian man. That’s why I wasn’t afraid to move to the city on the eve of what I still thought might be an unprecedented disaster. And God blessed us while we were there, as we finalized our pending adoption and added four more. It is hope in the future and not fear of it that brings us to the place we are.

Even with these blessings we had a growing distaste for life in Phoenix and wanted badly to be out in the country again. I’d even begun to read strange titles like You Can Farm and Five Acres and Independence. We wanted to know if this desire to leave the city was from God, so we waited some more, and spent five years in Phoenix, until we knew we were not going to acclimate except at great cost. Time will tell if I will ever get to anything like farming, but if God calls some or all of my sons to that life I will be happy.

I wanted this possibility for them. Living in the city, particularly in a city like Phoenix, which is such a stark contrast to the life we had in Northern Arizona, made me realize how disconnected to the creation a person living there could become. Here’s why this matters to me:

For since the creation of the world

His invisible attributes are clearly seen,

being understood by the things that are made,

even His eternal power and Godhead,

so that they are without excuse,

because, although they knew God,

they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful,

but became futile in their thoughts,

and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Romans 1:20

The cities of the ancient world were huge at 100,000 people. Nineveh was a great city, three days walk to get through, at 120,000. Cities of this size were also relatively rare, and most people did not live in places like this. Now the vast majority of people live in cities at least this large, or much larger. Unless carefully planned and constructed, cities will tend to obscure the creation. But this isn’t necessary; a properly constructed garden city could actually highlight God’s creation and bring glory to him. As it is most cities are built on rebellious premises, their theology hiding the creation, covering the surface with asphalt and concrete, and filling the sky with metal and glass, while sprawling suburbs submerge human diversity in endless rows of nearly identical tract homes, or blocks of apartments. And, lest you see God in the people created in His image, anonymity is fostered, now even to the point of those automated check-outs, so you don’t have to come face to face with a real person when you buy your pile of stuff. The things that are made by God get harder, though not impossible, to see. Even the starry host becomes dim in the glow of the modernists city.

Which brings us to a day a few weeks after arriving in Springfield when Naddy and I were driving one of our all day property search loops. We’d taken a space at the KOA, which was pure luxury for us, what with a free Wi-Fi connection, swimming pool, etc. I suppose it only took us a couple of weeks to figure out we were in the right place. The folks at church remembered us from our short January visit and were really helpful. We seemed to fit right into the church. I was looking at a lot of the right sort of places, at the right sort of prices, getting the locations off the internet and calling Realtors in when we wanted a better look, and Sue was trying to get the boys back on the full tilt home school routine.

Natalie and I spotted the real estate sign we thought we were looking for and turned up a steep short drive where we were looking at a little house tucked back a short way into the trees. For some reason it exuded privacy and even though I was on a public road I had the feeling of trespassing. We nervously snooped a bit, but couldn’t get a good idea of the boundaries of the acreage. I’m not opposed to looking for an owner and asking a few questions if they don’t mind, but seemed no one was home. We made another note to call a realtor and take a closer look.

Sue didn’t like the picture of the house I showed her. It became the "Pointy Roof House" in our shorthand, just one among some competitors. I visited it again before the Realtor appointment, after learning that the owner worked in town, and even stayed in town overnight with his relatives most of the time. I wanted to see the land. The house sat on a tree covered ridge running north/south. The property lines marked out a narrow rectangle at a right angle to the ridge, taking in part of the ridge top, some gentle hillside to the east, and a slope to the west which descended to three tree lined creek bottoms, spaced about evenly apart and running generally from north to south. I opened a gate (and closed it) and walked down the slope to the west. The Corrientes were nervous and stampeded down the hill in a long sweeping arc and kept their distance on the south fence. At the first creek I found running water. Not a lot, I guessed it at about 10 cfm. Except for my stays in Germany, I’ve spent my life in the dry west, but as a kid in Germany, I would follow a little stream like this for miles as it wound through the countryside and then into the city, a city which had paved it’s course in beautiful cobblestone and surrounded it with a peaceful park. Since then I have loved moving water, in any amount. We’d looked at several properties with running water, some of them with much larger streams, but standing there on the bank of the little creek, I began to hope I was done wandering. And if God grants it to me, I believe I am.

You might get the impression Sue is not as involved in this as she should be. It is not because she is not deeply involved in what is going on in our family, but because of how she is involved. She has been incredibly patient and supportive through our 23 years together and applies her influence on me with love and humility. She is the one who insisted that wherever we ended up, I needed to have a website to encourage others. I’ve never been anywhere where I doubted less that I belonged, and the reason for that is the evident happiness of my spouse, who often spontaneously expresses her happiness at being here. I know that this is a great blessing, for which I am thankful to God.

As our search narrowed, some of our target properties sold and others we eliminated for a variety of reasons. Sue was not enamored of the Pointy House property, and her inspection when the realtor opened it for us didn’t do much for her. Meanwhile I was literally dreaming about the little creek at night. I took her back to the property and walked her down to the creek bank. The cows made her nervous, with their own nervousness accented by horns. It didn’t help much, and I pretty much gave it up and kept on looking for property.

A few weeks went by and things were drying up in our price range. We found a few properties that we’d overlooked, though and drove around together to see them, leaving Nat to tend to the boys. One in particular was a property I had identified on the internet while still in Idaho. Obviously needed work, but the price was great. The website had marked it sold, but the deal had fallen through and the listing agent had not changed the designation. Sue is frugal in the best sense, and this property was a good 20k less than Pointy Roof. I was in complete agreement, so we went out to take a look.

We drove and drove and drove and finally got there. We figured the remoteness could be overcome, though. We had to hop a locked gate, but the agent had told us the place was vacant, so we went to check it out. It was supposed to be locked, but wasn’t. This presented a real temptation, since you’re really not supposed to go into a house without a realtor. On the other hand, with these remote properties, sometimes a realtor gets sick of having to drive out there all the time. He might save himself some time if people got into the house and decided that they weren’t interested in it. For example, someone might notice that the whole durn house seemed to move when one went up the stairs and walked around on the second floor. Then the people wouldn’t make the realtor drive all the way out there again for nothing.

Well we were disappointed, but when we got back the realtor with the Pointy Roof house called and wanted to know if we were still interested, his buyer was real antsy, etc. I acted bored for the realtor, but Sue wasn’t buying my act at all. She could tell that I still liked the place (I didn’t tell her about my dreaming about it) and I think she figured if I was happy, she could be too. That’s about how it’s working out.

The Gates of Zion

As some of you know I recently had the opportunity to attend a conference with some others from our church. It was a great time of learning and fun with some of my new friends here in Missouri, and I got the chance to spend a little time with some of my old Arizona friends who came to the conference. Jeff, Doug, Rob, Jon, Mike and the others from our old church are men who have greatly encouraged me.

The conference topic was the church, The Glorious Body of Christ, The Church in the 21st Century, and it was nicely providential that I got to think about this while seeing friends from our old congregation. One of the scriptures brought to bear in the sessions was this one:

The LORD loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.

This is a hard saying for Americans like me who are steeped in individualism to the point that we don't even recognize most of its manifestations, but the truth is that God gets a bigger kick out of the church gathered for worship than the family gathered for devotions, or the congress gathered for mischief. And don't mistake me, all of these are important gatherings, some of them are just more important than others.

The conference was also an opportunity to see how my agrarian thinking fit into the topic. We don't need to have a separate church life, home life, work life, but rather one integrated life where all these elements converge. One of the errors of moderns is to devalue the church, the gathering of God's people for worship, making it merely an auxiliary or help to our "real" lives, which are lived out in our homes and workplaces.

Being a member of the household of God requires that we show up at his table and eat the meal He provides for us. But the fact that we are speaking of it as a requirement, rather than an invitation indicates that our thinking has gotten muddled. Just as the family meal has disappeared in the greater part of our culture, the necessity of partaking at the table of the Lord has also been relegated to the ash heap. We've become like moody teenagers who'd rather stay in our rooms or go out with our friends than spend time around the table. And by the way, the fact that we are having some conflicts with our siblings doesn't excuse our absence. God serves dinner in the local congregation. It's rude not to show up.

The church is central to the restoration of creation. If the church is not restored to her proper place in our culture, no amount of returning to the land will save us. Only to the extent that agrarian ideas serve the body of Christ, can I be an agrarian. A restored and reformed Church will teach that Christ is the Creator and that those who know him should not despise what He has made, or subvert it to ends which do not bring glory to Him. A restored and reformed church will question the wisdom of industrialism, individualism, capitalism, socialism and whatever isms there are, including agrarianism, insofar as it rejects or ignores Christ, or attempts to make itself the center our lives.

A restored church will be in the center of the community, but not the ruler in some sort of hierarchical way. Fathers will govern families, mayors will govern towns, and elders will govern churches. Nothing good can happen in any comprehensive way if the church, the place of public worship and the teacher of Biblical truth, the Gates of Zion which God loves, is not firmly established in the town square.

I think it is reasonable to think that a reformation and restoration of the church would result in much of what Christian agrarians long for. And it would preserve us from two major mistakes, the first would be going it alone, and the second would be going without God.

Red Eyed Cows

An old cowboy went riding out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way
When all at once a mighty herd of red eyed cows he saw
A-plowing through the ragged sky and up the cloudy draw

A few years back Natalie had a memorable nightmare involving red-eyed cows, a city girl afraid of farm animals kind of dream. She jokes that she is still recovering from it. It probably helped me decide that it was time to get out of the city.

When we got to the place here it had some residents who eyed us suspiciously, a herd of Corriente cows, 15 plus a bull. Picture smallish horned cattle like a bullfighter fights. These cattle were being raised for the rodeo roping market, so they all had horns. A bit skittish they were too, I thought, but what do I know about cattle? Natalie detected a tinge of red in the eyes.

We named the bull Pablo, which the cattlemen thought was a good name. But he started getting sassy after not too long, tossing his headgear and giving us all a kind of macho look. He was replaced by an angus bull who was a larger, gentler sort of fellow and treated us all kindly. But he was not so kind to the neighbors bull, so he had to leave, too. Now we have sort of a teenage angus bull who looks sort of worried when the bull next door insults him.

I was at work a while back, and Sue (the beautiful wife)and the boys were taking a few loops around what we call the goat pasture (in hopes of future goats) when a real live Corriente cow with horns charged them. People screaming, jumping fences and whatnot finally gave the animal enough doubts to make her put on the brakes.

When I got home I went out with my oldest cowboy, James W. and it did seem to me that there was a mean black cow out there dropping her head in our direction, but she never would charge. My job was to tell the cattlemen (Mr. Eric and Mr. Ronnie) that they had a bad one out there and could they maybe take her where they took Pablo. Well, they kind of nodded but never did move the cow, and I figured maybe they thought the whole thing was a bit of an overreaction of the city folk.

The problem was that I had five boys (my own aspirations for them being in the cowboy direction) who were skeered o' beef. Later we had another charging incident with a different cow, but we decided it was because Brendan was carrying a jug of chainsaw oil and the cow must've mistook it for a feed bucket. That one put on the brakes real fast when the 3 footer yelled "no!" at the top of his lungs. I began to think, too, that the whole charging cow thing was just a bit of an overreaction by the city folks.

I figured it was my job to make sure my boys were not afraid of cows. They are bovines, for crying out loud. We had a few episodes of what I can only call embarrasing cowardice. Having a seven year old repetively screaming "they're gonna charge Dad, they're gonna charge" was too much for me, and I would have to go out to the pasture and show the boys how I could intimidate any herd animal just by looking at them like I was real hungry and pretending to be holding a bottle of A-1 sauce. I even tried to get the mean black one to charge me but she just stared at me with her head low. Eyes looked kind of red, though.

Anyway, we got the word on Saturday that our cattlemen had sold the whole herd of Corrientes. I was disappointed, since I knew that they were not really ready for market yet. I figured maybe the cattlemen couldn't take all our city silliness about charging cows. They never had really thought that the cow had charged, but that it must've thought Sue had a feed bucket.

Monday they showed up with a trailer just before I headed off to work. I miss all the fun around here because I have to go to work. They were getting them all in the trailer except one troublesome black cow. She was not wanting to get in the trailer and seemed kind of put out when Mr. Ronnie grabbed her calf and shoved it into the trailer. She kept her distance though and they had to keep trying to herd her up the hill. It's just a good thing that Mr. Ronnie is an agile fellow. Turns out he can move pretty fast and can even jump a barbed wire fence when charged by a red-eyed black Corriente cow. Even after they had her in the trailer she put her front hooves on the rail and bellowed at 'em.