Tag Archives: faith journey

Learning to Embrace Mint: Freshness for Your Garden and Soul

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Hello, my beloveds! The new baby chicks are in the house, scratching and pecking and chirping, the goat fence is up, the snow has melted, and the sun is shining today! Finally! Oh sure, there’s still dishes in the sink and junk scattered throughout the yard, but things are moving in the right direction… I think. Maybe it’s all coming too fast. The garden has started sprouting already and I was hoping to get it looked at before that happened. Still. I’m feeling good, so let’s not focus on the other side today, okay? Let’s just dive in to our muse of the week, shall we, and forget about all the stuff we gotta do for a short, five minute read? The stuff will be there when we get back.

Okie dokie, I was musing about what plant to focus on for this week and came up with mint. Realistically, I was thinking about catnip, but it’s in the mint family so I’m blending it all together. We were chatting about catnip at work, and my cats seem to like it… well, one of them does anyway. The other could take it or leave it. The warning with catnip, though, is that it, like most herbs, spreads like crazy in the garden. So if you plant it, thinking you’ll just grow a bit for your kitty, you’ll soon be overwhelmed and have enough for the entire neighbourhood of cats! So plant it in a pot.

Likewise for “mint”. I’m wondering if my bunnies would like a mint herb? There are just so many summer garnished desserts one can make with a fresh sprig of mint leaf. How can I justify growing vast, spreading plants? Do goats like it? I was at the dentist yesterday and requested mint polish…maybe that’s an option. (Giggle). Mint jelly! With lamb. Nah, couldn’t raise lamb. Mojitos? I don’t drink enough for those either. Anyway, mint was on my mind.

I was thinking about mint in context of the Passover meal. Symbolizing “spiritual freshness and cleansing”. Kinda like the dentist appointment. Fresh and clean again. Traditionally mint was thought of in line with purification. This is how I know it in the biblical context. Yet, I also discovered a few other associations I had not known. And so I share….

First, Mint may represent Hospitality. Perhaps after you cleaned your house all minty fresh? Or with those mojitos. I’m not sure what you do with the mint that makes it part of “hospitality”… but Google tells me so. So, now I have told you. The other one was also new for me. It stems from a story in Luke 11 where Jesus rebukes the pharisees. Usually, this story focuses on cleaning the outside dishes and not your “insides”… which are full of greed and wickedness, but a tiny mention in verse 42: “For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore justice and the love of God…”

Mint container Photo credit: medowlarkjournal.com

Remember how I said mint flourishes? Obviously, the leaders were giving tithe of that abundance and it wasn’t really any sacrifice at all. A tiny income from our garden. Little effort required. So. Hospitality, freshness, abundance and giving wholeheartedly. Did you get all those? I’m learning, that even when things are not totally clean, and my farm is a little crazy with half finished projects and chicks in the house and mud and chaos and an already growing garden that hasn’t been tidied up yet, that my friendships must take precedence. I hosted our small group with supper dishes piled in the sink. Shocking!

I’m not good at that. I get overwhelmed a little. I dream big and fall hard. And usually that involves something alive to take care of. Which, don’t get me wrong… the creatures are well cared for and loved… but they take up time. I am aware. And now you are too. Thanks for following along in our journey of chaos, where we gather spiritual tidbits of inspiration along the way and try and follow the straight and narrow. It’s a little messy, but maybe a little mint will freshen us up as we travel along and purify our hearts a bit today! Until next time!

Navigating Life’s Pathways: Lessons from a Spider

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Greetings, friends! It’s been a hot moment, hasn’t it? We’re back though, with another thought of the day to enlighten you. I was finally taking a moment to relax in the bath, when a teenie little daddy long legged spider decided to meander its way along the side of my tub. Now, I don’t have any fear of spiders, especially one so small, but I didn’t want this little guy to fall into my bath, or worse, disappear from view, so I gently scooped him up and placed him along the edge of my dangling English ivy (which I am so proud of… it’s growing well on my bathroom window ledge…long and sprawling… I am hoping to weave it all through the mirror). Anyway, I placed the little guy along the edge of the vine, hoping he would follow the path into the heart of the plant and live happily eating the fruit flies or whatever little gnat things live in soils. He did not. He made a quick veer to the right, grasping at the smooth painted bathroom wall to start his ascent. Once he slipped and slid along the wall, he had to spot check a few pieces of web to swing over the window ledge. I didn’t watch him after that. I don’t know if he every made it to the plant, or the sunny window, or simply slid down the other side under the sink and whatever lurks under there.

Which pathway to choose?

And so… you guessed it… I mused about that little spider and wondered why on earth did he choose the more treacherous path when I clearly had shown him the easiest route? The quickest definition of a pathway is “a way that constitutes or serves as a path” — it says nothing of the difficulty of the pathway, nor the length of the route, nor the dangers along it. It is simply a “way” from point A to point B. Plenty of us have traveled along many a pathway — both easy and hard routes in our lifetimes. They are worth a thought and a look back to see how far we have come.

Most of you know, it has been a hard, long, cold, snowy winter here at Itsnotta Farm. The snow is still deep on the ground, the days are still bitterly cold, and my farm chores are tough. Gates are frozen open, two feet deep in snow. Entry ways to the barn are icy because when it did warm up for a few brief days, the snow melted. The barn is a skating rink. I need to clean out my stall bound bunnies, but everything is frozen to the ground. One day, the wind created huge drifts enroute to the coop, I was waste deep and shoveling my way along. I bump my head on the top of the chicken run because the snow has lifted me up a foot or so taller. Goat fencing can’t be started because the ground is solid and still buried. Needless to say, I think we are quite sick of it all! Spring could not come sooner.

Photo by Anurag Jamwal on Pexels.com

Metaphorically speaking, we’ve been on a few pathways since moving out here. Adjusting to the weather was just one. We’ve had new schools, church, made new friends in a new community. I’ve been given several job opportunities and navigated that trajectory for awhile. Life is a seemingly endless pathway. And then you die. My faith would tell me that that isn’t the final checkpoint, though. The Bible tells us the pathway to Heaven is narrow and tough going. It’s a hard one to choose. Like my little spider, the challenges are real and sluggish. Choices we make now, will determine our fate. Is it worth the slow, arduous route to arrive in Heaven and eternal life? You bet it is!

I don’t know where you are, friend, on your pathway through life. I don’t know who reads my little public posts, or who shares them and why. I do know, God is faithful. He’s proven it time and time again. People around us try and set us on the path that is easy… one with few obstacles, an easy climb through the ivy. Sometimes, the sacrifice is worth the harder route. Sometimes, we need to plant ourselves and haul up over the ledge. It’ll be a bit more difficult for sure. Oh, we’ll have a few blessings along the way… someone will surely scoop us up every now and then and keep us from drowning; but it will all be worth it in the end. Trust me. Spring thaw is coming, and the pathways will soon be green again! And there will be plenty more spiders to watch.

Technology, Blogging, and Unwavering Faith

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Welcome back to another episode of my little world on this corner of the internet. It’s been a hot minute! And we have celebrated another blog-a-versary!! Do you realize we’ve been doing this for eight! count them eight! long years? That’s that obnoxious age where kids start to smell funny but don’t have real jobs yet with responsibilities and life is just stupid potty jokes. Am I super famous? No. Have I ever gone viral? No. Do I have a tonne of followers? No. And l’m inclined to say that I never will. Why? More than likely because not too many people know about us (besides the friends I casually mention I wrote a blog — thanks friends ;)) and not too many people really wanna hear about our escapades on Itsnotta Farm — and they especially don’t wanna hear about my Christian world view. Well… they might if I debated or dabbled in political hot spots or great controversies or flaming topics. But I don’t.

Oh, we touch on the occasional hot spot or news flash. I celebrate a few events (yeah family day weekend!) We do a few specials and host a few contests, but mostly, I just self journal, and you all get to share in it. And that’s okay. I think about when I first started mittonmusings.com. I did it to learn about coding, websites, internet and a bit of tech. That didn’t work much… this week I had to ask how to update my phone. I blame it on too many photos of chickens and grand baby. Which means it’s not my fault, right?

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

….and this is where my entire finished post just vanished when I went to upload and publish it! Grrr. See? Technology sucks. Now, do I remember what I wrote about? It won’t be as good as when it first came out… but here it is. Again. Writers, this happens, right?

Where was I? I fear. I fear for my kids and my grand kids who will have to live in a world where reality is blurred. Where A.I. has made real what is not, and what is not is made real. Where gender and traditional roles and food and money is no longer real. And the fear comes because this will be “normal” for them. I fear for my older family members who know this is not normal, but have to deal with it anyway, because that’s the way society is going. And we are being swept along.

Do you remember the days where we balanced our cheque BOOKS with a real pen and paper? Now I am beginning to think that A.I. could handle that too (for $19.95 a month mind you). I think I should start stashing $20 bucks under my mattress for a rainy day. It may get me to where I need to be faster. Or maybe not. Cash is going out the window too… but gold bars are too heavy to store under my mattress.

Even the church will be blurred. There will be no separation of church and state. Our world views will become intolerant and silenced. No, I don’t dabble in the political, because I don’t like it. There’s too much, well, there’s too much politics. Yet, I have said it here many times, God’s got this.

If we believe our faith to be true; and I believe it is; then I believe that our never failing God has a plan, and He knows where all this will end up. He knows the direction we are headed, and He’ll be there at the end of it. Me? I am learning to be gracious in this fast paced world (aka my #wordoftheyear) which means I have to slow down every now and then and smile at someone, or take the time to listen. I don’t think A.I. has really got a hold of that yet. People still count for something.

And the God who is faithful from the beginning is still in charge. He is the same, yesterday, today and forever. Talking donkeys, talking robots. It’s funny, when I started this post, I was looking for a prompt or a verse to get me started… and then the words just flow out… and then the words had to change and adapt and get written again because I lost it all. Which frustrated me, but reminds me again that technology dictates a lot. Still, my words are my own, and although it may never be famous, I think mittonmusings.com gets written because God uses it to touch someone, somewhere, somehow. Even the second time ’round. So, if that’s you, please drop me line and let me know to encourage my soul….

(and ease my pain at technology)