Wednesday, October 19, 2011

In The Beginning....

     It is difficult to start a blog.  What do you write as an introduction to an imaginary audience?  Yet there seems to be a need for an introduction of sorts. 
     I have thought about blogging for years, as a bit of a more intentional journal.  I was thinking that if I thought someone could read it maybe I would write better or at least more carefully.  The barn reference came from the season I was in at conception - we were immersing ourselves in the local foods movement by raising a respectable amount of food and had become good friends with people who were doing an even more ambitious job of it.  The first thing I noticed about livestock is that they are not tidy.  I know, that sounds a little obvious.  I had been deluded by the pretty pictures in the magazines.  The animals in the Mother Earth News must have been imported though, because the reality is a lot messier.

Which reminded me of life.

It is a LOT messier than I think it should be. 

The interesting thing about barns is that the only ones that are clean, are the ones that aren't doing anything.  For years I think the Lord has been trying to tell me the same thing about houses and lives too.  Productive farms and barns are messy, productive and fruitful families are messy, life that is living is messy, not disorderly necessarily, but lives full of people and experiences are going to be, by their very nature, more chaotic than lives lived for a photograph.

And, if you are not careful, you can spend a lot of time "cleaning up" at the expense of living it up.  

Anyway, at long last, I will begin this blog - fittingly so, as my barn is about to get quite a bit messier!