Garlic
Nice big garlic harvest this year. In 2016 I would've planted my first garlic from a little bag of probably 10 bulbs I was given. After 4 years of saving and planting the biggest bulbs each year (except for the first year when I was foolishly generous and gave away the biggest ones !!) this is what it has grown to ! I think around 2000 bulbs here, but I haven't counted them .
I made a bit of a tower out of a metal rack and some bread crates, as well as hanging some.
Ideally you leave the leaves on while it cures, but supposedly 6-8 inches on the stem is enough, and in the interest of saving space I cut the tops off a lot of them as I wasn't set up to hang it all.
If anyone wants some garlic let me know :)
If anyone wants some garlic let me know :)
Chickens
I have 8 new baby chicks !! 11 fertile eggs - one was rolled out by the mother hen at the halfway point, one more egg didn't hatch (yet!), and one hatched but the chick was left dead outside the first night :( I guess the mother rejected it for some reason.
Happiness of having 8 cute little chicks outweighs the sadness of one that passed away, but it was sad to see.
Happiness of having 8 cute little chicks outweighs the sadness of one that passed away, but it was sad to see.
His eye is on the sparrow and not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing. He knows, yet still he allows for that one chick to fall. Why ? Why did He let this happen?
"What is the price of two sparrows—one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it." - Matthew 10:29
So why? If God can stop the suffering, if he can save the chick why doesn't he?
He doesn't always stop the sparrow from falling, but rest in the knowledge that he knows
After thinking about this I had the opportunity to rescue a chick stuck in the egg.
I made a Youtube video of this.
Why does God allow suffering? I remember hearing in a church "God has no hands but ours". God can intervene without us, but it is true that God has made a world and put people in charge of it and given us the ability and the responsibility to take care of it, and its creatures... maybe better is "God chooses to use our hands"
Another example - I have a bucket of water for chickens to drink out of. A few times a wild bird has fallen in and drowned. The simple act of keeping a piece of wood inside the bucket so the birds can climb out again prevents this, and there have been no more drownings since !
As stewards of this Earth we can look and see and act to prevent the unnecessary suffering and deaths.
We could ask why did God let the bird drown, why did he let it fall? In reality he gave me the task to make my yard safe for the birds, it wasn't God's fault, it was mine, and the responsibility lies with me to prevent it happening again.
Much (not all) of the suffering we see is the result of people's poor stewardship, throwing off the 'shackles' of God's design and causing issues - both for themselves and for others
People living for money, exploiting others, even creating something useful that has an unintended consequence, degrading the environment with poisons that make us sick, ingesting processed foods that make us sick, harmful pharmaceutical products pushed out by companies who don't care about your health, just your money.
Much of the suffering (not all) is the result of what people have done. People that could have done something differently but didn't. Many of these are out of our control.
Maybe our response to "Why suffering" can be... what can we do to lessen some suffering?
With the chickens we could mourn the loss of the one that died, or we could notice the opportunity to save the one chirping stuck in the egg. Perhaps we should do both.
"Look around and find a people that are hurting and get close enough that they can see the colour of your eyes" - Ravi Zacharias
