The pigs are out and I just could scream.
Making sense of the little, hard things that are hopefully helping me grow.
Doing hard things together seems important. Recently our family has chosen a series of difficult tasks that have pushed us to, and sometimes past, our breaking point. Which actually feels great. It feels like we’re growing together.
I know it’s going well when I FEEL like screaming but don’t.
I was recently listening to the Practices podcast with Johh Mark Comer which makes the idea fasting sound just so great. It makes your thinking clearer, he says. It will make you closer to Jesus, he says. I think these things must be true eventually but so far our experience has just made me hangry, quicker to snap, and a lot less fun to be around. I think I’m taking a break from fasting for now.
Our current farm projects have other examples of hard things. Yesterday morning we were trying to move our pigs from their fence training phase inside our green house to a much more enjoyable mountain pasture when we realized that our fence training was insufficient. We proceeded to spend the first 2 hours of mothers day chasing pigs up and down the mountain that is our farm/backyard.
We’re also learning to milk our new dairy sheep. They’re funny, personable, but also really strong. Almost every day during chores they push past one of us through the gate and get into something they shouldn’t. Which could either make you scream, or possibly just laugh. My goal is to retrain my response to be the latter. One of the fruits of the spirit after all is joy. What if I was able to reframe each of these circumstances as if they were all just a funny joke.
As it sits each of these situations typically results in me saying something I’ll regret almost instantly and give me yet another chance to repair the small rupture in relationship caused by my saying something dumb in the heat of the moment.
These have to be opportunities that will help us grow, right? Closer to Jesus and closer to each other.
That’s what I’m banking on.