Chiggers, Rigors, and Something Bigger

It's been such a delight to have Crystal back home with us! She helped me with newsletter stuffing and stamping week before last.

 Last Sunday Crystal and Hannah traveled to Winner to help with the music and telling a story to the 30 children there for Sunday School in the absence of Ned and Judy Sherman. (The Shermans had to travel to North Carolina to be with Judy's dad, Derald Hunt, after his fall from a lift, sustaining multiple fractures and brain bleeds.) Then in the afternoon, Crystal and I went to the White River nursing home for the first time to make acquaintance with folk there. 

 

Crystal makes sure I have some food I can eat along with the normal meals everyone else eats. She made these yummy coconut macaroons with raw coconut, egg whites, stevia, and vanilla. I have only one left for tomorrow! 

She and I take walks together each day up to the mail box, including the day the goats decided to follow us.

We thought we had them safely behind the gate by the road, but before long they found a way through the fence (or over it) and were out on the road. Long story short, we never did get all the way up to the mail box.

 We were ready to can our goats! But their goat milk provides for several families, and will start to be a treat to someone new, we just found out this evening--a Lakota lady who says she loves goat milk. She was raised on it. Right now she is struggling with addictions, and if our goat milk can be a comfort and blessing to her--let it be so! I did the milking for a couple days when we arrived home without Danny or Hannah after Rose's wedding.

Purple cone flowers are all over the fields. I believe these are also called echinacea.

 

With the extra rain this year, I hardly dare to go outside except on the driveway because of chiggers, and I think this year the chiggers must even be in the dirt and not just in tall grass! Crystal picked some wild roses for a vase and must have managed not to get too many bites, but I get bit up just from picking lettuce and peas in the garden!

One day, dozens of bites popped out all over me, and it was just agonizing for a few days. New bites appear every day! However, I am not giving up picking food from the garden just because I get bites.

It's just annoying, that's all.  But the fresh salad fixings are worth the discomfort. Maybe. 

Here are some of the beautiful pea blossoms a few weeks ago. Now there are peas. I brought some with  me to Arizona. 

Besides unseen chiggers, there are very visible potato bugs. Hannah and I went out every other day to pick potato bugs off our potatoes. Jonathan sprayed them with some sort of hopefully non-poisonous spray.

Sometimes you'ld like to just give up on having a garden and farmette. But then you discover someone you've been praying for is longing for goat milk, and so you keep milking the ornery goats. And the doctor keeps asking how my diet is, so I keep growing the garden so I can say I'm getting lots of organic salad from my own garden--and sharing with others!

The chiggers and the rigors shouldn't keep us from ministry.

Because something bigger is at stake than our personal comforts.