Wood Cutting, Paradise Lost
Nothing exciting to update on this week. While it wasn’t super eventful, it was good. No news is good news. A taste of winter early in the week. Our water was froze when we awoke Tuesday morning. Thankfully it was back running with no busted pipes by lunch time. Back to a windy fall for the remainder of the week.
I cut and split a couple more loads of wood. We have enough ricked up to get us through the winter, but I’m going to keep cutting to get a head start on next year. And because I like it, and there are lots fallen trees needing to be cut up.
Amy kept the kids taught and the broth simmering all week. I filled in for her another week at the Abingdon Farmers Market. She’ll be back to Abingdon tomorrow with this month’s herd shares while I deliver to Marion. We are completely sold out of ground beef and pork sausages. Only those in the herd or with pre-orders will be getting any for the rest of the month. I’m taking more cows and pigs to the processor on Monday, but it will be early December before we get it back. Again, it will mostly go towards filling herd shares before knowing how much left we’ll have to sell.
Grass is still holding up. With more momma cows to winter, this is the largest our cow herd has been in several years. Though we’ve used several round bales as bedding for the pigs, I’ve yet to feed the first bale to the cows. I’m hoping the grass hangs on another month or so before lots of hay feeding begins.
The pigs on the other hand are going through a lot of feed. Our pig numbers are also higher than they’ve been in a couple years. Hopefully that will eventually result in maintaining a more steady supply of pork in the freezers. Another 18 tons of non-gmo feed was delivered from Sunrise Farms this week.
This week I started listening to John Milton’s PARADISE LOST. Though some of his old English writing is a bit hard to follow (especially while working and not completely locked in on what I’m listening to), so far I’ve enjoyed the extended account of the fall of man from the garden of Eden.
What kind of God would create a paradise capable of falling? Was the fall part of God’s plan? Love was God’s plan. If you were God, how would you maintain the perfection of paradise? By force? Though God has the power to enforce perfection, would that accomplish love? God has the power to enforce anything EXCEPT love. Love cannot be forced. Love must be voluntary, requiring a free will. Us having free will opens the door to a paradise lost. This is the cost of love. Love without the freedom to fall is not love.
Heaven maintains perfection and the completeness of love, not by God tyrannically ruling over heaven’s inhabitants as slaves, but by God’s family choosing to submit and serve him and one another voluntarily. About the state of heaven Milton writes:
“Freely we serve because we freely love, as in our will to love or not. In this we stand or fall. Hence, some are fallen. To disobedience, fallen. And so from heaven to deepest hell, oh fall from what high state of bliss into what woe?”
Before the fall of man was the fall of Satan who didn’t not want to serve or submit to a higher authority. God’s response to Satan’s rebellion.
“Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me all he could have. I made him just and right, sufficient to have stood though free to fall. Such I created all the etherial powers and spirits, both them who stood and them who failed. Freely they stood who stood and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere of true allegiance, constant faith, or love, where only what they needs must do appeared, not what they would? What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid when will and reason, reason also is choice, useless and vain are freedom both despoiled made passive both had served necessity, not me… They themselves decreed their own revolt, not I.”
Satan’s response to the hell that follows him as he rejects God:
“Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand? Thou hadst. Whom hast thou then or what to accuse but heaven’s free love dealt equally to all? Be then his love accursed, since love or hate to me alike it deals eternal woe. Nay, cursed thee thou, since against his thy will chose freely what it now so justly rules, me, miserable. Which way shall I fly infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell. I, myself am hell and in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour me opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven. Oh, then at last relent! Is there no place left for repentance? None for pardon left? None left but my submission…”
Have a good week.
Will