Category: Musings

The Musings section is just me being me. It is random thought about homesteading and sustainability in line with God’s truth.

Wives

I was getting ready for work the other day and I noticed how good I looked in the mirror. No, I’m not being vain…well ok maybe a bit. But when I noticed, I realized that it was only because of my wife. Although this is not a blog about Kristi, her womanhood is an important part of the picture I am about to paint.

Kristi is the best wife that exists. I don’t think they get any better. Sometimes I don’t understand how one human can have such a broad range of emotion, but I’m sure that’s as much for my lack of emotion as it is for her excess.

All of this weight I lost was an attempt that Kristi has made to figure out what foods are bothering my asthma. I quit smoking in January, which led me to realize how poorly I was breathing. It’s bad. She has been spending time finding new recipes, looking for alternative foods, and even working to maintain the same grocery budget through it all.

Why am i telling you a story about my wife?

Good question. I’m telling you because that little glimpse of myself in the mirror made me realize some things about wives.

All of this talk about “empowering women” seems more and more like a joke to me and I’ll explain why. Women have the power, but they see it as weakness.

If it weren’t for wives (women), men would have long been dead. We would have destroyed this planet eons ago over pride or neglect. We were created to create and to build and to work and to dominate. Not to dominate in a negative way, which is par these days, but to subdue the earth. Men were built for that, and I think that’s impressive. What I think is more impressive is that God gave women the power to subdue men…

Take this scene:

You’re at the bar with your girlfriend. A guy you’ve never met walks up to you and starts running his mouth. Your girlfriend could either push you into a fight, or have you out of that bar and laughing with a few words. Women own all of the emotions, so it’s no surprise that they can easily manipulate or subdue ours. While it was instilled in us to tame a world, it was instilled in women to tame us.

Women are the perfect balance to man. They are no less than man and no more. I’ll leave you with this nugget. If you’re a woman, you ARE empowered. If you’re a man who wants to empower women…be a man.

Paradigm Shift

There has been a paradigm shift in our mindsets around consumption over the years. People are relying less and less on GMO’s and more and more on local food. From backyard gardens to farmers markets, people have had enough of big government farming.

It is my goal here to instill a sense of pride in your neighbor with the annoying chickens. To have you smile instead of dry heave at the smell of the compost pile across the street. I want you to understand the hard work, dedication, and fear that goes with full time farming on a small scale. It’s not because I wholly disagree with industrialism. God made us to be ever striving to reach our potential. He made us in his image, and he is The Creator, after all. It’s because these small scale farmers and homesteaders feel a sense of pride in something pure. Pure food. Humane food. Healthy bodies. Helping the world to be a little more sustainable. These are all things that God had in mind when he made this place.

It’s very interesting to me how people’s mindsets can change so quickly and to such a degree. How few years ago was it when we grew up on family farms? Men were trained by their fathers and grandfathers. Women were trained by mothers and grandmothers. Family was more important than 401k, and our food was from dirt to table.

Fast forward to now and you wouldn’t know it was the same place. We slave at a job to pay for a car…which we need just so we can get to our job. We buy big houses and big televisions and our children are raised by IPads. Men are not men and women are not women. Our kids are surrounded by filth and hate at every turn, and rarely have any sort of a family structure to rely on.

I don’t know about you, but I get real depression if I think about it for too long. I find that I have to distract myself from the reality of the world so that I don’t lose all hope in it. “For all that is in the world-the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life-is not from the father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” 1 John 2:16-17 ESV. Our world, as a whole, is headed the way of worldly desires. It is up to us to act singularly against the grain of the flesh. We are light and truth to people living in a world of darkness and deceit.