Husbandry 101 - 5th Edition
Freedom on the fringe...the final installment of "Husbandry 101: what it is, where it went, and why we need it back"
A lovely, good-morning to ya’!
You’re here and that’s amazing, and I just have to tell you how humbled and grateful I am for this week. The Lord is good. He has given me grace to see His goodness in a new light over the past five days, and there are just not sufficient words to express the fullness of my heart.
Thank you, dear family and friends, for showing up this week. Yes, I know who you are. I know you’ve taken time out of your already-full life to read through the words on the pages, you’ve given of your substance to be a blessing to me, you’ve shared, you’ve commented, you’ve encouraged me in presence, in word, and in deed.
You are the real deal.
And I pray each time I sit down to write, that the Lord would use me to be a blessing in return.
This marks the last of five posts that set our foundation for this husbandry thing. Good husbandry frees us from many of the burdens that tax the joy and beauty out of stewardship. And from here we build, cultivating our senses, our practices, our habits of husbandry.
Today we focus on something a little less tangible…on freeing the mind, more specifically that sharp little corner in there that worries so much about what the rest of the world may think if you take a sharp right turn off the beaten path.
Freedom #5: to be a bit of an outcast.
When your friends start looking at you sideways because your weekends are spent rotating your grazing animals, when you’ve got salted meat hanging from your kitchen ceiling, and your kids are responsible for instructing their classmates in the ways of the “birds and the bees” because they’ve seen how the bulls and the cows do it…well…I’m afraid you may be on your way to living on the fringe of the society you once kept.
But I’v found that a sense liberation begins where approval by the masses ends.
No more pretenses, no more disguising the real, no more filtering topics of conversation, no more blurring authenticity behind a veil of the socially acceptable, no more sacrificing the utmost experience of this life for fear of the pain of its rough edges.
How liberating it is to finally let go of all the facades and just be human, fulfilling your role in the created order.
But don’t worry, you’re not alone. There are more of us out here than you think. I mean, there’s at least two of us right now if you’re still reading this. *wink*
I’m sincerely grateful to have you out here.
Whether coming to you from the brooder, the field, the back porch, or dog-side, here is where I look forward to sharing with you the knowledge — habits of husbandry — the good Lord has so graciously granted me through decades of caring for His creatures.
As a wife, mother, veterinarian, farmer, cook, wanna-be-herbalist (wanna be a lotta things), I’ve been afforded a life rich in lessons (mostly learned the hard way) that I pray will be blessings to you as I attempt to relay them in a real, usable, attainable fashion.
You’ll see animal husbandry as our central theme, but as you’ll discover, husbandry is like the smell of bacon frying - it gets in your hair. It permeates all the things. So we won’t be able to help ourselves but to follow its delightful wafts into the kitchen, garden, larder, and the back forty.
It won’t always be pretty, but it will be real.
Let’s get to work. And do it with all our hearts. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)
Cheers,
Amanda