NOURISHMENT, SAFETY & INDEPENDENCE

NOURISHMENT, SAFETY & INDEPENDENCE: How rural life provides time-tested answers, benefits, & blessings to new problems. Recently, a mother came to me with questions about how to deal with the New World Order, her motherly instincts correctly told her to protect her baby by leaving the crowded city & choosing a positive rural community to live in. Several times I have visited with Germans who lived during WW 2 in rural Germany, & they told me that in contrast with the suffering of the city people, they never lacked for healthy food. The tomatoes I ate while writing this post were off my own plant, not only did I enjoy eating them, but I had the joy of participating in their creation & eating healthy. This post is about the blessings that rural life has for us, as well as some of its drawbacks. It will discuss how rural life teaches us, strengthens us, protects us, & stimulates the fruit of the Spirit. Our roots are on the land, and if we plant our lives there, it will honor us with blessings.

DELIGHTS. There are many spiritual & other rewards for the gardener & farmer. Does the artist in you enjoy all the colors? How about all the wonderful fragrances like the lemon-sage, the butterfly bush, the roses & peppermint to name a few? One’s childlike curiosity is tantalized watching from day to day as life springs forth & climbs up from the soil. What a beautiful planet we live on, no wonder parks & national forests, beaches & landscapes are so popular. Nature glorifies God; its purpose is to glorify God. But there is no centralized control of nature, no Central Committee w/ a 5 yr. plan. Nature is not a goddess demanding worship & sacrifices.
Eco-nazis would have us believe that man is about to kill Mother Earth, “Mother Nature exists by a delicate balance that man is disturbing.” (Al Gore, Earth in the Balance.) But the slight touch of mankind is not going to kill the mythological goddess Gaia. Nature is wild & strong. For instance, we worry about forest fires, yet certain plants & birds actually thrive because of forest fires, like the Kirtland Warbler. Nature continues, but will man survive? In the coming difficult days, those who can work w/ nature and get out of the big cities with their plagues, riots, thefts & gangs may do much better than those trapped in the cities.

THE LAND TEACHES US. Paradise was a garden; gardens have lots to teach us spiritually. Christ was extremely wise; he used the lessons of nature & farming to teach spiritual truths. One of the first lessons of nature is humility…the power of man is put into proper perspective. A paradise setting like Hawaii has to submit to tsunamis! Nature is wild & dynamic. Even a garden, while not a jungle, still has elements of the untamed, wild and unexpected in it. So Christ used this unexpected element to draw a lesson about a seed growing in secret.(A) One of the important lessons the land teaches us is productivity. Christ taught about the power of good seed(B) as well as unproductive barren plants.(C) One can take your best shaped, best sized potatoes, slice them into quarters, store them properly till planting…and keep repeating this each year to improve one’s yields. Likewise, strawberry plants that produce well can have their runners replanted each year to improve productivity. The concepts of the water of life & good soil were also taught by Christ.(D) Water regulates the temperature of a plant, allows it to obtain nutrition from the soil, & makes up much of the plant body. Trees can rob other plants of water & nutrition. A line of trees, called a windbreak can provide shelter for animals, & protection for buildings and help shade yards. Yet too much of a good thing, trees that stop all wind, can cause more problems than they solve. So we learn to balance & regulate a good thing. And that can bring joy, for instance, taking an unproductive neglected orchard that is not producing and transforming it into a productive orchard.

TIMING. Timing in life is so crucial. To say a word at the right moment is powerful.(E) Spiritual timing is essential but rarely mentioned in sermons, probably because most sermons are ill-timed, merely man-inspired & not what the Spirit wants said at the moment. Poor timing produces the opposite effect. Watering plants is like that. Lots of water at the beginning can create a plant with weak roots. At other pts. in time if lots of water is not provided the plant fails to develop properly at that stage. Have you eaten radishes that grew w/ little water?—hot tasting. Another aspect of time is efficiency. Over time, farmers have develop lots of little efficiency tricks. With the tractor (or horses), we would make long turns at a row’s end rather than slow tight turns, so that we would do our work efficiently. The straw left over from harvest, became animal bedding, & then as it mixed with manure, it added to the manure’s fertilizer value.

MUCH TO LEARN. God gifted me with abilities to research & others w/ other impressive abilities, so when I was the hired hand on dairy farm, I located a detailed soil map done by the govt. of the farm. (It took me like 5 min. at the library.) The farmer was amazed to see his land photographed, and the soil mapped and analyzed. It is the thin film of water around the soil that the plant uses, not the puddles of water on the surface. This is why the sandy loam of western KS is so good for growing crops and why some clays and swampy land are terrible. The type of soil and its depth are important issues. One great thing about rural life—it will build character & teach responsibility. One will have to learn how to observe as there are lots of details to watch & lots of factors to play with. Nor is it all fun, one has to appreciate the joy of a hard day of work—we would do farmwork from pre-dawn to dark. That will make a new person out of a city dweller! While the city person eats in a lunchroom, the rural person may be eating in the fresh air with flies & bees dive bombing his food, and bugs trying to crawl up one’s pants & arms. Patience and fortitude and how to observe are learned in the country.

WEEDS. Christ warned about weeds & something similar leaven (representing sin). What happens when one buys horse manure for one’s garden to make it more productive & it is filled with weed seeds? The Word teaches that if a person is like cancer to a community, they need to be dealt with. There is a positive purpose to weeding.

FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT. Besides teaching us and strengthening us, rural life provides us with the Fruit of the Spirit: Peace, Joy and Patience especially. God has blessed us w/ a beautiful world, wild & dangerous, but full of blessings. Man was called to tend God’s paradise and then afterwards the planet in general. He was not called to reinvent it for his own evil desires, and to create Frankensteins. The World has given us imitations: amusement parks like Disneyworld w/ fake alligators, fake plants, fake hills & fake fish, not to mention imaginary creatures like Goofy. If you don’t want to get off the couch, you can watch an imaginary world on TV. Or you can shut off the TV and experience real life!

(A) MK 4 (B) MT 13, MK 4, LK 13 (C) LK 13 (D) Water of Life-JN 4 & 7, REV 21; Good soil—MT 13, MK 4, LK 8 (E) PRV 25:11