Freedom. The Fourth of July. Independence Day. Liberty! What are those words evoking in your mind? Mine? Well, it’s not a six pack of coke and a bunch of fireworks. Don’t get me wrong, my heart swells as much as yours does when the Blue Angels scream by overhead and the fireworks are crashing in the night but, don’t forget this Fourth that the party on a long weekend isn’t all this holiday is about.
If you missed our music video, ‘Does Your City Have Country Roads‘ check it out. Did you see the clip of my son Willie planting potatoes? I went with my father and with my son just a few days ago to dig those same potatoes and wow, what a harvest! Rich, red goodness rolling out of some of the blackest dirt you’ve ever seen. Folks, this is freedom!
Let us not forget in all our lounge-around-the-lake weekend lovin’ time this Fourth that there was blood shed so we could quietly grow our own food, on land we could own, to provide for our families through some hard-earned sweat. Men didn’t draft a Constitution and die for such a radical act so we could soak up the A/C on the couch, work for some God-forsaken Corporation, race toward a retirement so we can float around with no purpose in life (did you read my dad’s post?!). Are we content to just watch as our Federal Government steadily intrudes so deep in our lives we will be robots of the State before we know it? We now live in a time and place in this once-free country where slaughtering unborn children is legal and growing tomatoes in your front yard is a punishable crime. Men are marrying men and women are marrying women, but have you seen a gallon of raw milk in the grocery store lately? How about a good old-fashioned jar of homemade pickles? Have you tried raising a hog, butchering it yourself and selling a pound of sausage to your neighbor? If it isn’t enough thrill to watch the Food Police come down on you for such a heinous crime, just try and make a little artisan cheese and age it on a piece of wood.
The call today is to stand up and use what freedoms we do have left. The ones we do have are rapidly going away folks! Turn off the television, get out of the stock market, sell your townhouse, buy some land, and grow some food! Food safety and food security – do those issues concern you? They should, for they are some of the most critical in our world today. But there is only one answer and it’s repentance towards God and a rebuilding of a good old fashioned larder stocked with food you grew with your hands, preserved, and put up to carry you through to the next season of harvest. A little more chlorine, a dose of irradiation, some 2-4D, a few more advancements in cancer treatments, just a handful more regulations about bacterial count and some more cheap fuel is not going to fix the problems we’re facing today.
I challenge you to take a step towards Freedom in your life in some kind of way as we mull over what this Fourth of July really means. Jesus Christ has died on the Cross to forgive us our sins and provide us a means of escape from Hell, but He isn’t going to plant our potatoes for us. And leaving the growing of our food to multi-national, global corporate conglomerates isn’t exactly providing us with the local, nutrient-dense, whole food we need to feed our families with. We need a new paradigm, but I do believe it’s the oldest one around that we need to return to. Genesis 3:23 “Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.”
Check out this garden. It’s one of our customers, Anne Mogul, and she fertilized with a little cow manure from our Jerseys. This is where it starts!
So let’s count our blessings. We are not in a Revolution fueled by bloodshed. We have a little precious time left in which we can fight for our independence through gardening, by raising some chickens, in keeping a family milk cow, by simply working each day towards a little more self-sufficiency with our God’s help.
May God bless your Fourth of July!
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