Finding God’s hidden truths on the Farm

Most people know that I live on a farm. Everyday you never know what will transpire. Every animal has its own sort of personality. Babies come in the spring time, new kinds of animals are added occasionally, and mishaps are bound to happen. With mishaps there is usually an animal involved that has a lot of personality or stubbornness. One particular animal comes to my mind and that is Wild Bill. Wild Bill is a fairly new addition to the farm. He is a goat. I have been after my husband to add a goat or two to our farm family to help keep the briars and shrubs down in the sheep pasture, as the sheep are not so fond of them. I was thinking of a couple of pigmy goats. There are small and cute and the grandbaby and neighborhood kids would love them. They could interact with them and pet on them and it would be so great! Then I got a call one day from the hubs and he said, “I found you a goat, we are going to pick him up this weekend.” To say I was tickled to death is an understatement. I just knew that I had lost this battle with my hubs over getting a goat. “I hate goats,” he often would say. “They are nothing but trouble.” Well in my mind, I was thinking of those cute goats at the petting zoo and how friendly and easy going they seem to be and couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. Then we got Bill. Wild Bill that is! On the first day home we kept wild bill in the barn within the sheep pasture. We do this with all our new animals when we first get them home. We put them in a safe space to calm down, relax, and get used to their new environment and get used to us as well. Then once they are calmer, we will turn them out. By then they are just so glad to be out with other animals, they tend to join in without complaint and we don’t have to worry about them running off! But then we have wild bill. Wild bill has a unique personality. You know the one animal that looks at you sideways when he sees you. You wish you could figure out what he is thinking. With every step you make towards him he steps back one. Every now and then you may get close enough to see his eye color, but that is about as close as you will get. But the one thing I did not count on with wild bill, is his fleshly desire for shrubbery. I knew goats liked shrubs, grass, weeds, trees, and everything green. Yet, wild bill has an over zealous desire for shrubs. Not just any kind of shrubs, but the ones that can only be found on the other side of the fence.

Now, I know what you are thinking. I bet wild bill won’t stay in the fence. Well, that is part of it. You see wild bill will partially stay in the fence while the rest of him is outside the fence eating shrubs. To paint a picture for you let me explain it like this. In our sheep pasture we have a woven wire fence that goes all around it. Woven wire is made into small squares. This fence is to keep predators out. To protect the sheep. Well, as the sheep put their heads within those squares often to reach the greener grass on the other side, they have no horns to get stuck and they can do it without issue. When wild bill does it, he gets his head stuck because of his horns and in a fit of wanting to get his head back in the fenced area, he begins to scream and cry with abandoned for help. A cry we hear all day long as we continually over and over again to rescue wild bill from the trap of the fence. On an average day we would have to go out there and get him unstuck 3 to 5 times a day. No matter how much time he spends stuck and how much he agonizes over the situation, he continues to do it again and again. He never learns. So, my genius hubs, who is the farmer and I am just the farmers wife, has a solution to the problem. He takes a blue pipe, and tapes it to wild bills horns and gives him a crown fit for a pasture king. With this crown being wider than the holes in the fence, wild bill can remain stuck free. His internal desires for greener shrubbery become a distant action and his mind concentrates on what is in front of him and not on the other side of the fence. A crown of humility, yet a saving grace! As, wild bill lost his beautiful crown the other day and I raced to free him again and again, it reminded me of my own fleshly desires and what lengths God goes to not only heed my cry, but protect me from making the same choice over and over again.

Just as wild bill has the fleshly desire for things outside of his circumstance, we as human have those same desire. We each have things we desire that are honest and pure, but we each also have things we desire that are not so honest and pure. These things usually are not good for us. They can distract us from our daily lives, pull us in a direction that is away from Gods will for our lives, and keep us from growing in our daily walk with God. Fleshly desires also keep non-believers from choosing to follow Christ. Their desire to stay with what feels good to them often overclouds the rational mind of what it may be doing to their soul. We live in a society now that caters to instant gratification. The standard of this life, as a whole society, is to look down our noses at people who do not accept the desire of the flesh as a guide to live this life. I was born this way, life is not fair, God does not care because he won’t deliver me. All these statements have become excuses for us to live by our desire and not by the rationality of what our desires can do to us. The time has come that we all must acknowledge this and make a choice to stand for something. To stand firm with what we know is true or give in to our fleshly desires.

I struggle everyday with the desire to stay in my dream world or get up and face reality. For years I would spend it in this dream world sleeping my life away. It brought me good endorphins and wrapped me in a fuzzy blanket of blissfulness. Anytime during the day when reality became too hard, I would whisk myself away in my mind to that far away dream land for a moment of bliss. My fleshly desire to not deal with reality and hard times, left me in this constant state of fleshly desire. It became like an addiction to me. Something to always fall back on so I would not have to face the reality of my circumstances. Until one day, I got deeper and deeper that my dream world could not rescue me anymore. You see, that dream world and that fleshly desire can only serve me for a little while. Then the reality of life has to take over at some time and I have to face the choices I have made. I have to accept my life as it is and acknowledge my fleshly desire, and face it head on. With doing this I can change and grow, and learn how to cope with life in a healthy manner that lines up to my core beliefs. When I fail to acknowledge it my heart and mind become overtaken with my desires and resentment, hate, selfishness take over and there is no place for anything else. It becomes a lifestyle that leads away from truth and surrounds me with the blindness of the lies of my desires.

Just as Wild Bill continues to let himself be consumed with his fleshly desires; he has a farmer father that comes to the rescue. He tries to protect him. He places a crown on his head that others deem as inhumane, yet the ultimate goal is for his safety and protection. You too may be one of those that often lets your desires carry you away to places and circumstances that hinder you from growth. You have a heavenly father that may give you a crown, or a thorn in the flesh to keep you from going back to those dark places that will leave you trapped and empty. Are you gonna claim God as not being fair, as not caring, or are you going to see the truth of the matter and humble yourself to admit your fleshly desires?

Its time we each get off the couch, stop making excuses, and get busy growing in our faith. Start reading our Bibles more, get back in church, get back to fellowshipping with other Christians, continue to stand for what is right in Gods eyes and not conform to our own selfishness and fleshly desires! Without this, our children have no hope! So, parents give them a foundation they can stand on that will stand the tests of life. It may be hard at times to follow but, in the end, it will give them a chance to live victoriously and full of hope!

This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. Galatians 5:16-17

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Does Hope really have power? If so, How?

I thought four letter words were bad and should not be taken seriously until I met HOPE. In my deepest and darkest of moments I can say hope is something that seems non-existence and truly hard to grasp. It is hard to explain, but there are times when some emotions are almost impossible to remember or experience. I can remember being in misery for so long that I forgot what joy was or what it felt like, or how to conjure it up with thoughts. I would even take time to sit and meditate on joy and find there were no feelings to be found to follow through. Has this ever happened to you? I would tell my doctors that something is just missing and they would look at me with blank faces. Until one day I came across this verse and it made sense to me.

“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” Romans 15:13 

So, I am going to break this verse down for you as the Holy Spirit has shown it to me.

  • Now God of hope – God is the beginning and ending of hope, the expert on hope, and the man upstairs who gives out hope.
  • Fill you with joy and peace – HE has the power to fill you with joy and peace. This tells us that joy and peace or linked to what we have hope in. If we lack hope then we don’t have joy and peace. There may be times as I have said before that I couldn’t muster up my joy and peace. In those times, I remember floundering because I had no answers or no Faith in what I was doing or putting my hope in. True hope can fill you with joy and peace.
  • In believing – The importance of our beliefs. This tells us the first place to look when our hope, joy and peace are disturbed is to look at what we believe in. For me, this one, is the key. I have often found myself believing in something that has no merit, no hope of a good end, and that is not what God wants for us. Other times there are beliefs that other say are true that are contradictor to your peace in God. When this happens, it is of great importance to look it up in your scripture and study the entirety of the answer. Look at the scripture in its setting and what is going on in the story as well as multiple scripture throughout the Bible talking about the same subject, then draw a conclusion. You will be amazed at what you find and peace in having a true answer and believing in it.
  • That ye may abound in hope – God’s desire is for us to abound and live with hope. Hope is what gets us through each day. You can have hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is God’s light shining for us a pathway to him, or you can believe its Satan standing with a flashlight leading you astray. Each belief has power, but which one has a path out of the dark pit, and which one leads you further down?
  • Through the power of the Holy Ghost – God has promised those who believe in him the gift of a comforter to abide with them. That comforter is the Holy Ghost. Some people recognized it as their conscience. Others as an entity to guide them right and wrong. I believe the Holy Ghost is many things, and you will find that as you study multiple scriptures on the subject, but in this verse, it defines the Holy Ghost as one who has power. Not just any power, but power to instill and give hope. The power to guide us to a place of hope again. I don’t think the Holy Ghost is necessarily like a fairy godmother that waves its magic wand and poof! You have hope again. I think the Holy Ghost is deliberate, careful, and slow to teach us how to have hope again. You know that saying, “give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”? If the Holy Ghost just gave it to us, it would burn out when we used it all up, but if the Holy Ghost took the time to guide us on how to obtain and have hope, then we can acquire it at anytime in the future.

So many times, I would often get mad at God for not granting me hope that I had earnestly prayed for. Why would he want me to suffer so? This verse shows me that God does not want me to suffer, but that in doing things His way, He wants to grow me. Grow me to trust in Him and in His promises, grow me in my mental and emotional development, and grow me to understand the power I can have with his help to conquer the deepest and darkest of hopeless places. All it takes is a mustard seed of faith and we will see our mountains become small, our deeply planted roots of anguish uprooted and planted in the depths of the sea, and our lives flourish into a tree where others find hope and security. (Matthew 13:31, Mark 4:31, Luke 13:19, Luke 17:6)


 And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: 
for verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, 
ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; 
and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Matthew 17:20