A Year In Pictures . . . part 2

September 15, 2014 by The Smyths 4 Comments

Glory Moments: Our five blessings have been amazing on the crazy journey we’ve been on . . . they have been the reason for most of our glory moments.

If you missed the first part of our past year in pictures, you might want to skim it right quick before you read on.  We are hoping to catch up with friends and family through a series of posts with mostly pictures, recounting some of the “glory moments“, challenges, and lessons learned so far on our journey into a whole new way of life . . . agrarian community living.  As you can see from the photo above, our youngest has had the toughest time on this journey, but he is walking now and discovering that life isn’t so bad when you can get out of the travel trailer and explore.

Lesson Learned: It really hasn’t been that bad living in a trailer considering that we have all learned to love even when times are really, really tough.

Lesson Learned: Don’t try to muster up fake joy, turn your eyes on The Joy Giver and He will give you the real deal . . . don’t miss the moments.

One of the first little wild treasures to pop up on our land, truly a glory moment. Many were “stolen” to transplant around our new fruit trees.

We prayed for years for land and Yahweh blessed us with 20 acres in the rural Missouri Ozarks, just outside of Goodhope. Little did we know at the time that we were just a little over a mile away from a family endeavoring to live like us.  It took a mutual friend and a Baker Creek festival for us to finally meet them, months after purchasing our land.  We still deeply long to have our best friends from California with us here on our land (in His time), but so praise God for the blessing of the family down the road.  

Lesson Learned:  Perhaps one of the biggest lessons we have learned so far is that the agrarian way of life cannot be lived without true community, at least that’s how we feel about it.

Yes, community is essential . . . our old barn was the only structure we had to work with from the start and we couldn’t even use it to protect our building materials due to how dirty it was. Having a close community would have made our beginnings so much lighter.

Glory moment: This sawdust “house” may not look like much, but if you use a composting toilet, you know how excited I was about this handy little shelter that fits nicely as part of our garden fence line. The other side of it has a small opening along the bottom to get sawdust from inside the home garden area. My husband can back his truck up and dump right in . . . love his handiwork!

Challenge: How do you grow food on hard old rocky pasture land? Huglekultur Back to Eden . . . until the bugs come . . . and the drought . . .

. . . and we still had more tomatoes than we could find the time to put up! We are definitely going to have to build a solar dehydrator!! Lesson Learned: Less is more in so many areas of life.

Enjoying our spring fed creek before it dried up for the first time in years. Lesson Learned: We should have set up our water catchment as soon as the roof was done instead of depending on our spring. Water must always be a priority!

Glory Moment: Kip set up two bee hives this past May. We just recently extracted almost two gallons of honey! Getting to experience some (sweet) fruit from all of his labors has been so joyful.

Praise Yahweh for all the glory moments, challenges, and lessons learned . . . they have all deepened our love for Him and each other.  More moments in pictures to come . . .

Blessings,

Carrie    ><>

A Year In Pictures . . . part 3