Getting Back to Why

This moving blog hosts and the learning new blogging skills while trying to learn web site making skills for a future web page for the farm along with an already full life of planting and weeding and painting and cooking has made the transition long but it has revealed many things to me and the why of it all, why I’m doin’ this, why I did this…

It is not necessarily that I left the “why” entirely, but one thing that this moving blog sites and rearranging things has done for me is to remind myself why it was I started writing a blog. Why I was encouraged to write a blog.  I know for a lot of folks out there in blogging land, a blog is a way to record family history, or document their garden work, or knitting or dinner recipes and I did too, to some extent, as it falls into my daily life.  But mostly I began blogging to write my thoughts on God.  My thoughts on how a person of God ought to live. How God leads those of us here at Vicktory Farm and Gardens  And to write about how we, the Vicks, live our daily lives as we live them to God.

And as I said, I don’t think that we, or specifically I as the main writer of the family, left it completely in regards to the blog, but rather I feel I have not fully attended to the work I began with.   Most certainly I know have held back from saying many things that we have learned and come to understand even more fully.  I think I have held my tongue, fingers really, so as to not offend. 

Mind you, I would not now intend to offend if we found ourselves returning to why we “came here” in the first place.  Quite truly, if I write to what Dirt and I see as the truth of a matter, a reader that disagrees with what is said can really only go in one of two directions; correct us because we are biblically wrong, in which case we will change our position if we see that indeed that is the case, or shake their heads in disagreement.  Either way, I’m not sure that what I say can really ultimately offend if a person has peace about the manner in which they live out their lives in God.

But I do know that there is a third way, we may look like asses to others and garner their disdain and ridicule, and it may in fact be expressed here in the comment section of any of our posts, not unlike the fellow from Colorado.  Or we may hear of their disdain and ridicule through the community grapevine.  Either way, we will hear of ridicule and how others feel that our way of life, the way we do things, is a waste.  We may even hear that any sort of friendship with us is or has been a waste.  It is and has been a hard thing to take in from stranger and friend alike.  It can certainly cause a person to back off, to change up what they meant to do in the first place.  It obviously did for me.

And then, this last fall and winter, along came the officiality of Vicktory Farm and Gardens as an actual legit business on twenty some acres. Followed by the swap of blog spaces this spring and the idea that the web site and blog would serve the purpose of business.  So then maybe not so much ought to be said of how we think folks who know God, who claim God: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as their one and only God ought to then live out their lives.  Just more reason to be subtle.  Oh to speak of God?  Yes, one always ought to let their God connection show, but to really get into the finer points of living in God, besides having a rotating scripture posted, or tell their Dear Readers that God loves them?  The real stuff becomes easier to shelve here because it is after all a business about vegetables, fruits, flowers and meat.

But then the first things begin to nag.  There are too many words about God and our lives in God, and our lessons about who God is,  lurking in my various draft files.  Drafts about real meat, real fruit, the real dirt and soil on which we plant and grow a life.  

And then, when it is all just too much and the seams are about to burst and this very article has sat in the draft file for weeks, a friend, calmly in a conversation about something else entirely, refers to our ministry.  He used that very word, a word we, Dirt and I, had rather dropped from our vocabulary because of its current usage in culture, modern Christian culture. 

But our friend spoke of our ministry and he spoke the word boldly and firmly in regards to the issue being discussed as if it were a word in our daily vocabulary and not just in our hearts, buried, and we took it in.

He spoke of a ministry that is indeed our very life.  Not a ministry that we go to do on Sunday, or Wednesday or Saturday.  Not a ministry that we write a book for or even a seminar for, or deliver a workshop on.  Not a ministry that we do one or two or even five days a week and then have a day or two off from, but a ministry that we live and breathe every day.  A ministry that is every thing we do and are and where we live and how we have lived, how we are going to live.  A ministry that includes every thing from the silly crazy painting schemes on the walls of our old breezy farmhouse to inviting people in who need a rest from the wolves of the world, for an afternoon, or a month or a year or a lifetime. 

A ministry that we thought would really take off somewhere else, in another state perhaps, a place more conducive to living out our lives in the manner we see God leading us, in the future, when we were really ready and able to do it.

But our friend said it of us now.  As if he always thought it.  As if we all knew it.  As if we all live like we minister all the time, every day in everything we do.  As if we all, in our close group of friends, think and mostly operate under the belief that we don’t need a degree or a sanction from a denomination, or a license to minister the word of God to others, to one another and to strangers.  That our ministry is our lives, and really not just us that hang out together or think this, but everyone who knows and understands who God is to the best of their current ability to know God, everyone really does have a ministry. 

And we know it to be true, it is now that we are “there” we are in the midst of “doing” not waiting.  We may indeed be waiting for more, for an expansion to be given more, trusted with more because we have been faithful with what we are trusted with now.  But we are now living our lives in God with a call to be loud with what we know, with what we have learned.  Loud with the grace and the truth that brings us into an abundant live.  A life we love to share with others.

Dirt and I have found over the years that we have a predisposition for marriages, preparing children for marriage, purity; entering into marriage with the least amount of baggage as possible, purity; repairing the damage or unpacking the baggage together as a couple, purity; for redeemed lives, purity; and striving to be for each other and outsiders the tangible illustration of Christ and His Church, purity. 

So Dear Reader, when I write, you may find I do a little less writing on garden methods and more writing on things Dirt and I feel very strongly about in regards to marriage, for we find ourselves in need of “and do the things you did at first.”   We also have become very encouraged by what we have found in the word in regards to church and who we are when we are then church and in His Body and what we do because we are church, and therefore you may hear a bit about those thoughts as well.