Baby Chicks, Exercise, Another B-Day
Baby Leon made the farming rounds with me Saturday morning while Amy was at the Abingdon Farmers Market. She’ll be there again tomorrow 8-noon. Friends from NC came up the the valley for a fun Easter weekend.
I haven’t fed a roll of hay since last Friday. With an inch of rain over the weekend, grass is coming on strong. The kids are helping me keep the differing groups of cows all moving. On Wednesday we moved three “patches of cows” according to Carter. Several new baby calves this week. While checking the cows with me Monday afternoon, Amy was excited to see a newborn taking its first few breaths of Rich Valley air and then after just a few minutes, stagger up to its feet, wobbling as it attempted its first steps as its mother patiently stood by the calf licking it from head to tail.
Baby calves were not the only new life we welcomed on the farm this week. Chicken season has officially begun. Our first batch of over 300 newly hatched chicks came yesterday. Which means that much of our attention earlier in the week was set towards getting the brooder prepared for them.
We use our brooder for baby chicks in the growing season and egg layers in cold winter months. With the skid steer, I cleaned everything out on Tuesday. Amy, Ms. Desiree, and the kids surprised me by setting up the partitions, cleaning up the heat lamps, putting down new wood shavings, and readying the feeders and waterers while I was out land clearing Wednesday morning. Planning to set everything up for the brooder that afternoon, when I got back to the barn, they beat me to it. They’re the best!
Aside from that, I’m trying to spend as much time bush hogging as I can. After six months of wood burning, the outdoor wood stove is still burning strong. We split and hauled a load of wood yesterday evening to begin replenishing the wood shed. Hallie was a big help while the others played. She’s getting stronger.
Speaking of getting stronger, Justin Whitmel Earley writes about exercise and getting stronger in THE BODY TEACHES THE SOUL. We generally think of exercise as building physical strength. Earley adds that it can also build spiritual strength. Strength is acquired through testing of our limits. Which is hard.
“Hard things make our bodies and souls stronger.”
Earley gives reference to Peter Atiev saying, “Exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live the rest of your life.”
“Everywhere we look, we find that the modern spirit craves efficiency and ease, but science shows that mind and body, humans benefit from hardship, stress, and strain. To build strong immune systems, for example, children need to get sick… Modern life has tricked us into thinking that the good life for us and our children is to avoid suffering. It is not. As is often noted, we do better to choose our suffering, lest suffering choose us.”
“Everything we want is on the other side of difficult.”
“You, not me, should choose your exercise routine. Something is better than nothing. And really, something is the whole point. The point is not to be a professional athlete or look like a model; it’s the opposite. It’s to embrace discipline and obey the command to steward your bodies as a temple of the Holy Spirit, so that you can find your small sufferings and become more like Jesus through them… And keep in mind that walking, not triathlons, is the exercise most highly correlated with longevity.”
"It is easy for Christians to shake off exercise culture as a worldly endeavor that idolizes the body, but such a perspective too quickly swings to the other side and ignores the body, dangerously ignoring health altogether…”
“Muscle memory is a thing. Explain an activity to someone and they might not get it. But invite them to do that activity with you and slowly they will learn it… Similarly, virtue comes not from hearing a truth once but from practicing it over time.”
“Jesus promises that the Christian life will be difficult, but he tells us to take heart because he has overcome the world and it will all be worth it. If you feel like being a parent is hard, being a good worker is hard, being a follower of Jesus is hard, working on your marriage is hard, that’s because all of it indeed is hard. But the fact of its being hard does not meat you are doing it wrong. It often means you are doing something very right.”
Have a good week.
Will