Friday, May 29, 2015

My chickens are awesome!

Isn't it beautiful?

My amazing chickens are already laying...


Not in the nest boxes I made so nicely for them.


Isn't it beautiful?! :-D

Update: Mom found a nest in the garden, so I am tightening up security. Also, this one turned out to be a double yolker. :-)

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The Truth About It All!


    You will find that I talk about truth a lot. The following is my framework for truth, and why I think it is so important to find truth.

    We need the truth, as humans. If you do not have the truth, you live a deluded life. Every lie that you believe is a step in the direction of Satan, every truth is a step towards God. An  extreme example is the criminally insane; they believe an untruth (the lie that they can/should get what they want through criminal actions) to such an extent that they are certifiably insane. Knowing the truth about everything leads us to right actions, and the lack of truth leads to wrong actions. That makes truth vital to a Christian's life!

    Truth tells us about grace, love, faith, hope, God, and many other pivotal ideas.  If you are uncertain about the truth of your eternal hope, will you be certain that you need to keep trusting God? If you are ignorant of the truth of God's love, will you love the way he says to? We must find the truth about our own faith as well: what is it that we believe in? What part do we play in God's story? In short, Truth Matters! It is also hard to get.

    How do we find the truth then? Where can we get it? Which teacher has it? What denomination or sect has it? Thankfully, in the vast wilderness of advertised truths, God has given us the truth in the form of scriptures. Yet, how do we find the truth in these scriptures?

    There are a couple ways to read and interpret the scriptures: 

  • Having a teacher tell you what it means before/as you read it.
  • Reading it to find out what the author was trying to say.
    Having a teacher tell you what scripture means is the easiest answer. You read the Bible, and then a person tells you what it means. Or they tell you an idea, and give you the scriptural support. In both cases, a person (Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, John McArthur, C.S. Lewis, James Vernon McGee, Chuck Swindall, a parent, a mentor, a pastor, etc.) is telling you what the Bible means. I think this system is a bad idea

    The alternative is reading the Bible with the intention of hearing the author. You read the scripture, and you find out what the author was trying to say. If he never says it, he is not trying to say it; if he says something repeatedly and clearly, he is trying to say it; if he talks about it in a certain way, he means it in that way, etc. etc. It sounds simple, just reading what the author says, and yet that means that if Paul never mentions Heaven as the place you go to when you die, then he probably doesn't think that. 

    This means sacrificing the group thinking,  and sacrificing the safety of the herd. YOU must be responsible for the truth of what you believe, if you are figuring it out yourself.

    But what if we need these teachers? What if we CAN'T find out what those obscure Apostles and Prophets meant? No, we can do this; scripture is meant for the common man. God has given us scripture in our own language, with the study resources to explore the original language too. It isn't rocket science to go to your Bible and look for what Peter, John, and the rest were trying to say. Those men were qualified, trained by Christ to teach the gospel. They were no dummies, they knew the story and the plan better than anyone. In fact, you could say that since neither God nor Christ directly wrote those books, these men own Christianity. We need to find out what they believed, it just takes time and a willingness to sacrifice what you already think. Not easy, but not complicated.

    This is something we all need to grapple with, and determine: are we going to sit and listen to a teacher telling us what the Bible says, or are we going to go find out ourselves?



Thursday, May 21, 2015

I know I just posted but...

I just posted a long thing, but this came up:

MY HERO!!!

Fun Blog Challenge Thingy

So my sister Becca has two blogs



She just posted one of those weird challenge things that let you talk about yourself on the internet, and nominated me for it too. And because I wouldn't miss a chance to talk about myself....

But... I am not challenging someone else or doing any of the tedious rule copying/following. I will only answer the questions, because that is the fun part.


So here they are:

1. Something you feel strongly about?
Um. Lots of stuff. I am going to say Truth, in all things, but especially in theology. Truth is super important: Truth tells us how the world works, about the reality that exists beyond our perception and feelings. Truth is really important for everything and I cannot possibly say everything I think about it in a tiny, easy-to-read snippet.

2. A place you would like to visit someday?
Hm. I dunno. I am kind of Bilbo: I like staying home, drinking tea, and reading, and taking walks in places I know. And then, if I HAVE to go on an adventure, I usually run into trolls and nearly get my friends eaten. True, I may help those same friends escape from prison, and then chat with dragons while wearing magic rings, returning home fabulously wealthy and with a terrific tale, but I spend a lot of the trip thinking of my tea set and warm fire side.  Maybe I would like to visit England. :-D

3. Cool, obscure skill or talent you have?
Spitting. I can spit.  And I can almost whistle through my fingers. 

4.Something I most likely don't know about you?
I am your sister. You know lots about me. You might not know that I am secretly an evil mastermind, playing a globe-spanning chess game with another villain, named Pietro.

5. Favorite genre of music?
Probably movie music- dramatic classical, although I do enjoy Relient K, Lindsey Stirling, and Owl City.

6. What are you going to do with your life?

Probably something really mundane. Farming, I hope

7. How do you react in stressful/frightening situations?
You just want me to say I faint, don't you? Well I do, as you well know. But in my dreams, I fight like a ninja. 

8. Is being right/correct important?
Uh, yeah. See my statement about truth...

9. What is the last word you spoke aloud?
Probably "fabulous", in the sentence, "I am so fabulous!" After finding these memes...

10. If you could change anything about your physical appearance, would you? If so, what?
I would be fit, and not fat. Because being fat has a weird social stigma, and also it is really annoying to try and live around it....

11. Do you lean more towards introvert or extrovert?
Introvert, people are exhausting. Bilbo is an introvert. I am Bilbo.

12. Slugs or snails? (Important question, that.)
Snails. Still slimy,  but they have a handle to grab so they can be gotten out of the way. Slugs are just gross, and they get slime all over, and if you accidentally touch one it is all over for the rest of the day because it doesn't come off!

13. If you were travel back in time to any time period, where would you go? And this is not an optional trip. 
You're lucky you get to chose the time.
Ok, so mandatory trip to the past, in any place and time? Well, I will decide that I will be here (Oregon), in the 1840s,  Because I work at a historical site from that time and so I feel prepared. :-) Plus you could get free land! If I was being smarter, I would choose to be part of Abraham's family or something, because even though it would be harder, God made some sweet promises to them and you get big rewards for good behavior.

14. Did anything terrible happen to you in your childhood?
I think I was depressed. Other than that, my childhood was awesome. I grew up on a farm!

15. How fast can you run?


Actually, I am pretty fast. Not Athletic-Boy fast, but Could-Probably-Beat-More-Than-Half-Of-You fast... maybe. :-D

Have I ever told you how I feel about my nose?


Or at least, my tent and recent exploits as an herbalist? :-)

The tent
A short history: when my family decided that my brother needed his own room, and hence I would need to trade around and share a room again, I decided to not do that. I decided to build my own bedroom... so with help I bought a tent and built a platform for it out of lumber we have from the farm here, and voila! Now I sleep in a tent. It has some great improvements: I ran an extension cord out so that I have light, I built a stove (with lots of help from Dad), and there are many cool things like that around... 


I have also been working on collecting the herbs I want to have next winter. So far I have a pound or two of Horsetail, and a few bunches of Stinging Nettle.

Stock image from Google

Horsetail grows in moist areas, like ditches etc. I got mine from the logging landing that has a spring near it, in our woods. My brother and his friend helped collect it and the nettles. 

Stock image of a stinging nettle from Google
The boys were really helpful with the nettles; while I gingerly snipped and carried, they whacked and toted. :-) The nettles really do sting, but only if you touch the bottoms of the leaves or the stem, generally. I got stung and I think the boys did too, but we got a whole bunch of the stalks for putting in teas or hair treatments. 


The nettles like moist areas too, and I have seen a lot in ditches, but while the horsetail does well in almost-mud, the nettles seem to like perpetually moist soil, in the shade, instead.

That is not even close to my whole list. The list looks more like this:

Herbs I want to gather/grow this year:
Nettle
Horsetail
St. John's Wort
Peppermint
Sage
Parsley
Rosemary
Thyme
Blackberry leaf
Dandelion, root and leaf
Chamomile
Rose hips
Elderberry
and more as I find them...

Some of these are on the list because I want to try to make this:


What have you been up to?