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I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday. Time will tell, but I wonder what the future of agriculture will look like? Will agriculture continue to get more consolidated and larger? Will that trend correct itself and will farms get smaller? Well, if I was going to bet money, I would say that we will stay with the trend of the big continuing to get bigger and the smaller farms and ranches becoming more like hobby farms. Homesteading continues to become a realistic goal for a lot of people realizing that for the sake of their sanity and...
It is the time of year to count your blessings. I try and do that every year – well, actually more often than that, but you get my drift. Sometimes I get caught in a rut recounting my blessings. I mean I count my family and friends as a blessing, but sometimes almost as an afterthought. I count our farm and our community as a blessing, but do I always remember that on a daily basis? It sounds horrible, but sometimes I think of my church almost as an afterthought as well, which means that my relationship with God has undoubtedly taken a b...
Can we all just agree that it is good that the election is over? Can we just get back to some sort of normalcy with our lives and get on leading them? I’ve got a lot of friends who seem like they are coming from together over the results of the election. I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I said I was a fan of Kamala, but I’d also be lying if I said I was an ardent supporter of Trump. It was kinda like the best of the least, in my opinion. It is mind boggling to me how we anoint humans and put them on a pedestal and then tear them apart when...
I have pulled way back on my political posts. Time was, all I ever wrote was about politics. As time has passed, I have written more and more about my relationship with Jesus Christ and how everyone needs that same sort of relationship with our Savior. There is zero doubt in my mind that my priorities in writing have been steered in the last couple of years or so by the Holy Spirit. I think this week it has been as well, but we are going to talk about politics, too, and that may be a dicey recipe but here it goes. This past week in Wisconsin,...
I am very conservative in my thinking. I’m not just talking about my political thoughts. I’m talking about socially. I’m talking about spiritually. I’m talking about everything that goes on in this earthly world; my thought process is very conservative. So when people are very liberal in their thoughts and processes, I typically disagree. Not to the point that I call them names and insinuate they are morons or idiots or anything like that. I just disagree and most of the time I go on down the road. However, this week, I found something that I j...
I don’t believe in coincidences. I feel like God puts thoughts in our minds. He puts people in our paths. He puts obstacles and rewards right in front of us, not only to test our obedience but also to reward us. One of the biggest tests is being a lifelong OSU fan, but I digress; that is a rant for another day. I think about what I am going to write about all week long. Time and time again, God will put thoughts in my brain about topics that range from His Son to politics to social issues to farming to ice cream. I then turn worship music on S...
I have two rants this week, one a little more serious than the other, but nonetheless topics that seem to be near and dear to my heart this week. The test will be to see if I can tie the two together. When did cuss words stop being sentence enhancers and just normal conversation? Don’t get me wrong, I am far from perfect and on more than one occasion I have let a string of words go that would make a sailor blush. I can remember instances when a snorty cow might chase me or when a colt might startle or when the OSU football or basketball team ma...
We have had goats on the farm on and off, mostly on, for close to 20 years. We’ve had Boer goats, which are meat goats, and we have dairy goats as well. Deb makes goat milk soap when she has time, and it is wonderful. It is great for your skin and goat’s milk isn’t too bad either. It isn’t anything like the sweet, creamy goodness that comes out of a Jersey cow, but it sure isn’t bad. I totally see how small farmers with limited acres decide that goats would be a good enterprise for themselves. We mostly use them for weed control. There isn...
Sometimes, when you least expect it, Jesus will slap you upside the head with a blessing. I have been abundantly blessed by our Savior. There have been times when I recognized it straight off and there are many times when I didn’t realize the blessing till much later. There have also been times when Jesus has slapped me up against the head with a 2x4, trying to get me to snap out of the funk I was in. This past week, he hit me upside the head with a railroad tie. I have been fighting high blood pressure issues for quite a while, but since M...
I think that we, as Christians, do a great disservice to the people we are discipling to, and to our Lord Almighty, when we pretend that every day is great and all we ever experience is rainbows and unicorn flatulence. We don’t like to talk about our struggles – at least I don’t – but we, as individuals, are not the only people who struggle with whatever the issue is. There are so many things that all of us struggle with. Mine lately has been buying into the plan that God has for my life. I’ve heard it all and believe it all, too – God’s perfe...
Two burnt pieces of toast – one black and one blacker. I haven’t had the opportunity this week to eat breakfast with mom much. So, this morning I went down to eat breakfast with her. That used to be an almost everyday occurrence, but life and jobs sometimes get in the way of what you would rather do. Mom is now 85 and age and health issues have slowed her greatly. By her own admission she can’t remember anything anymore and usually walks with a walker most of the time, and that isn’t my mom of old. I remember a mom that would work all day at...
I find many similarities between having a strong faith in Jesus Christ and trying to eke out a living, or a partial living on a family farm. When you let Jesus into your heart, you realize that you are broken. You realize you can’t do life by yourself. You realize that you don’t have all the answers and that nothing really makes sense, ‘til that day you submit to your Savior. Likewise, what happens when you plant a crop? Yes, you do all the hard work of cultivating the land and planting the seed, fertilizing the crop, but there is no guara...
Today, I remember how long a life is and how just as long a spiritual life is as well. I was thinking in church today just how important taking a step forward in your spiritual journey really is. You don’t have to climb mountains every day. You just need to take a step forward every day. I used to have a palomino gelding named Abner. He was a retired rodeo horse who was worn out. Some people would say he was an easy keeper. If those people were telling the truth, they would say he was fat, dang near obese. His old knees wouldn’t let him go ver...
I have always been taught that if you are bringing cows, calves, yearlings or whatever into a set of pens you don’t sacrifice the whole herd for some stragglers or a few head that want to break for their temporary freedom. It doesn’t matter if you are on horseback, on four wheelers, in pickups or on foot. You never take a chance on losing the whole bunch for the sake of the few. Isn’t it kinda funny how a relationship with Jesus is the exact opposite? I am a traditionalist. I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I value life...
We got home from the hospital a few hours ago and this is what I know. Today I did something that really isn’t column worthy, yet at the same time it is and I will tell you why. I passed out at church today, smack dab in the middle of worship service, and why was it column worthy you ask? It’s because my church family was immediately there for me. I tell people all the time you don’t have to go to church to have a relationship with Jesus, but you miss out on so much when you don’t have a church family. Today was the reasoning behind that st...
His name was Corey Comperatore. I refuse for people to forget his name when all we can do is yell back and forth. I didn’t know him. He was a complete stranger to me. I never heard of his name before. He was the individual who was killed at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania last weekend. Corey Comperatore. He was attending the rally on Saturday with his wife and young girls when the shots rang out. He shielded his family from the bullets and was struck and killed, doing what a husband and father is supposed to do. His name was Corey C...
(I wrote this a year ago, but it is sure appropriate with the debacle of the presidential candidates we have to choose from this time around. What has changed? God save our country.) I read an article this week, which is apparently old news, about the health status of former President Jimmy Carter. According to the article, he is having some major issues, not unexpected at 98, but still serious enough for him to decide to opt for hospice care. I have a lot of respect for Jimmy Carter, none of which is political. Our political beliefs are at pol...
Literally nothing we planned this summer has gone even close to the way we envisioned it. I no more than started to recuperate from my health issues than Mom had hers. The jobs we thought we would do didn’t come because we were busy doing other things. The garden we thought we were going to grow didn’t materialize because we had more important things to worry about. Doctor appointments took the place of job appointments. A trip I wanted to take one weekend this summer withered away. The medicine change has literally zapped me of all of my energ...
Jesus will get ahold of you even when you don’t realize he did. After this week, some of you might think I would be coming out of the gate with both barrels blazing towards a politician. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it, a lot. But every time I have gone to write something this weekend, the words just wouldn’t come. Nothing would flow out of my brain and to the tips of my fingers and finally to the keyboard on my computer. I can’t imagine anyone liking their character questioned; I sure didn’t. I kinda felt like Zechariah wh...
I had a half an hour today that I will remember for the rest of my life. Fortunately, it was God led. Let me tell you about it. When we pulled up to church for Sunday school today, I checked my phone before we got out of the pickup. That is normal for me. I check and see if somebody has tried to get ahold of me or if there is something I need to know. As I opened my phone it opened to a meme that had a beautiful picture of a mountain in it. Now, this mountain was covered in beautiful native grasses and beautiful wildflowers. The picture was...
People are trying to destroy this country – some from the inside out, some from the bench, some from a television station, and some from a plaintiff’s table in front of the aforementioned bench. I really don’t know what is going on with this country. We have a president who doesn’t know if he is coming or going. We have an ex-president who will be a felon at election time and one of those two yahoos will be our next president. Politics is just strange. Consider a former president who captivates his followers so much that they are sharing...
The word patriot gets passed around way too easy these days. If you don’t depend on the government to eat you are called a patriot. If you are a Trump fan you are a patriot. If you flip off the left you are a patriot, or vice versa. If you live off grid you are a patriot. If you have a small arsenal you are a patriot. If you stand up for personal or constitutional rights you are called a patriot by some. Now all of those examples might have a smidge of what it takes to be a patriot, but all in all, those are not patriots. By the way, Tom B...
A couple of things really caught my attention this week. Well, more than a couple but there is only enough room to express my thoughts on a couple of them. First, I fixed a water leak for a lady underneath her kitchen sink. It was a conglomeration of galvanized pipe, copper tubing, PVC and pex. It kinda looked like a little kid had gone crazy with his Legos underneath there. There was about 15 too many fittings under there and as you know the more fittings used the more chance of a leak and when I got there, a couple leaks had sprouted and...
The past couple of weeks have been eye opening, scary, aggravating and great all at the same time. I knew I wasn’t feeling good. I wasn’t even feeling right, yet I had no idea that my blood pressure had spiked to a level that I was lucky I didn’t stroke out. I knew that I didn’t have the energy I had just a few months ago. I knew I was getting older and just figured this was what it was like to hit the wall, although it sure came earlier than I thought it would. The past couple of weeks have been scary. I can tell you truthfully me working and...
I don’t know about your God, but MY God sends me reminders every day – reminders of what I am supposed to be doing, who I am supposed to be listening to and who I am not. Sometimes I listen so intently that I hear every word; however, most of the time I don’t listen that well. Then he sends red-letter reminders. Apparently, I haven’t been listening for a month or so, and, on last Wednesday, he sent one of the red-letter reminders. I can hear it ever so clear and concise out of his mouth now. The caring but no-nonsense tone of his voice telling...
