First Calf, Cattle Drive, Body and Soul
Our first baby calf of the year came this week. Hopefully many more to follow in the weeks ahead. The first batch of baby chicks comes next week. No, we’re still not ready for them. Welcoming new life on the farm is always exciting. Love this time of year.
We smoked ORVF Boston Butts over the weekend. Amy made multiple batches of chicken bone broth this week as well as one round of beef bone broth.
Keeping cows moving. Orders and coolers. On Wednesday the seven of us pulled off a mile long cattle drive up the road with a herd of 100 head to sort out the bigger end for finishing this summer.
Hasten and I got the cows into a smaller lot before the big drive. Then with walkie talkies, we dropped off everyone in their place. Hallie and I brought the cows out of the field onto the road. Wren and Carter blocked the upper end of the gravel road to turn them down the hill. Amy and baby Leon waited at the end of the gravel road to turn the herd onto the hardtop road, and Hasten blocked the paved road at the top to turn the cows into the barn lot. A sigh of relief after the barn gates were closed. After the sorting, we sent the two groups further up the road into different fields on the other side of the farm.
I’ve been renting a skid steer with a brush cutter attachment to work on some brier patches, so any spare time aside from the norm has been devoted to land clearing.
Yesterday after chores and a few hours of bush hogging, I made the quarterly delivery to get ORVF meats to families in Farmville. It was a long ride allowing for ample time to think. After getting my head space in order, I listened to some of THE BODY TEACHES THE SOUL by Justin Whitmel Earley.
“To me, the Christian life was fundamentally a head project. It was about knowing the right things, which I assumed would trickle down eventually shape the rest of my life. I still have the highest regard for reading and theology and conversation, but I see now that my narrow focus on the world of knowledge formed a certain kind of life, one that was not balanced or healthy at all. It never occurred to me that the Christian life is also a habit project.”
“The reason I didn’t think any of this would matter was because I had no idea that ordinary little habits would bring the most extraordinary change in my life. I had no idea how much the spiritual disciplines would invite me to physical transformation, and I had no idea how much the physical disciplines would invite me to spiritual transformation.”
“When our heads go one way and our habits go another, the heart follows the habit.”
“Our habits won’t change God’s love for us, but God’s love for us should change our habits.”
With today being Good Friday and Easter Sunday ahead, we especially reflect on life, death, and resurrection. Though we can’t help but question God’s design while living in a broken world filled with death and pain and suffering, we must understand that it is death that makes life real. Death is what makes life precious. There is no life without death. And there certainly is no resurrection without it.
“Death means that everything present will eventually be rendered past, but resurrection means that everything past will again be rendered future. Resurrection upends time and our sense of time. The future exists because resurrection does, thus we cannot understand the death of the body outside of the resurrection of the body.”
“Our body’s brokenness is bound up with our body’s goodness. We cannot really understand one without the other. Nothing reveals that we were made for wholeness so much as our brokenness.”
“But usually we just find ourselves looking up, shaking a fist at the heavens, demanding an explanation. In Christianity, God does not give an explanation; instead, he gives himself… God does not explain pain but instead walks into it.”
Have a good week.
Will