Then I Thought of Home

Well, it's mushroom time in our area. I feel like I should capitalize the word mushroom in order to give it the respect it deserves. Mushrooms here are a huge deal. It's the time when you find out who your real friends are. If you know where the mushrooms are,  you never tell anyone. People sneak into other peoples woods under the cover of darkness to get them. When you find some you often sneak them home as if they were some type of illegal drug and don't tell a soul you have them until after you have already fried them up and had supper. To tell to soon would put you in a position of having to share and that can never be. The local jeweler even has a sign up that they will trade jewelry for mushrooms.  Now that is serious. I was raised to soak mushrooms over night in salt water to rid them of any little critters that might be hiding in them. Mark believes a man should eat them as soon as he gets back from the woods and any extra protein in them is jus...

Sometimes we just need to be still. Why do we sometimes think we have to say what we think and tell what we feel? Why do we think we need to tell what others have done or what others have not done? Why do we think we need to tell  everyone? I think the reason is we think to highly of ourselves. If I really love you like I'm supposed to I will seek to protect you as much as I seek to protect myself. I wouldn't get with my friends or on facebook and tell all about how I had done others wrong or how I had offended them. So why do we do it to others? Do we really think others don't hear us or look at what we said and think something negative about us? I heard a story about  a person once who was offended by someone. She made it a point to tell everyone she could about how this person had offended her and her family. Once when she was telling about it a lady asked her why she thought she needed to tell  her that, she ...

What do I love about Spring?   The real question is what do I love about springtime on the farm or maybe the even bigger question is what is there not to love about springtime on the farm?   Just today as I was standing at the sink washing the breakfast dishes I noticed the lilies coming up around the clothesline posts in the backyard.   The Robins are bobbin all over the front yard and I can hear the birds singing.   The field across from the house has a wet spot in it and the geese make it a stopping point every year on their return north.   If you step out on the porch just as the daylight is coming you will hear them really carrying on over there. That always gets our farm dogs, Noah and Runt worked up and barking and brings a quick end to any hopes I may have had of sleeping in.   The fields are dotted with new calves, sometimes they are lying in the sun beside their mommas others times they are running and bucking throug...

I remember someone asking Mark what he thought about the future of the church and how he would help get it there. He said, "The future of the church is in the past." There is so much truth in that. Not truth that in that we only sing traditional hymns, throw out the power points and sound systems but truth in that we have got to get back to the Book. We don't have to stop reading Christian books but we have got to stop reading them at the expense of reading our Bibles. We need to be careful that our Bible study groups are not so busy studying Bible study books that the Bible can be left at home. It's easy to go to studies now and never even have to open your Bible. We have got to be careful that our Adult Sunday School classes don't turn in to a devotional time with just a snippet of scripture that we jump around with every week. None of this is meant to be legalistic but instead it should be lovalistic. We should so love the Word of God that we d...

With the kind of winter most of us have had and from following as many farm pages and blogs as I do and after being raised the daughter/granddaughter and now a wife of a farmer I'm more convinced than ever there isn't much a farmer doesn't know. Now I'm not saying he is an expert at everything and I'm not saying he never has to call in the professionals, I mean Mark has Dale Weller and Leonard's Electric's phone numbers seared into his brain. Still though most things a farmer can take care of on his own or at least he will give it a good run for the money before he calls for help. When does he learn it? How does it happen? He can probably tell you a few things he remembers learning but most of it just sort of happened. Most of it he learned by doing life and by trial and error or because he had to right quick. Maybe it was when his dad needed him to get up on that tractor and drive or when he had to crawl over a gate and get in that pen and hel...

My two favorite Bibles. The green one has my heart but when the pages starting falling out I got the pink one and now it's stealing my heart. Marybeth lost her mother recently and posted on my facebook page how she had been having  sad dreams about her mother and when she told her husband about it he said she should place her Bible under her pillow. She said she did and it helped. Once I was at Bible study with my friend Bobby and she told of a time earlier in her life when she was going through a hard experience. She said she would just lie in bed at night holding her Bible to her chest. She just needed to feel it close to her. I knew just what she was talking about. I love my Bible and often have found myself just needing to hold it close. I've always been impressed with all the pretty Bible covers or jackets I see so many have. They look so nice and organized and so I've bought a couple different ones and attempted to use them. Needless to say I n...

Today's topic is boundaries. Boundaries can be a unit of measure. They tell us how far we can go, how much of something we can have or can do. We all have boundaries, we may not respect them but we have them. They're for our protection. When we have land boundaries it lets everyone know where they belong and where they don't belong, what they are responsible for and what they aren't responsible for. It's the same way in life. Sometimes we cross our boundaries and we know it right away. The stress is overwhelming. The alarms sound. Sometimes they don't. Or maybe they do but we're in so deep we can't hear them. We cross our boundaries and fail to hear the alarm when we over commit or take on to much but somehow get it all done. Everyone is proud of us and talks about how much we do and we think everything is okay. We think we got by with it. We think we've done it all. But is it really okay, did we really do it all? Did we ...