When you think you’re done waiting…
If you read my first blog post on this page, you learned that this farm has been a LONG time in the making. As in, twenty years or more. Twenty years of dreaming, learning, planning, hoping and waiting. Lots of waiting. All that waiting with this fire burning in my belly that also manifested as a prickling in my skin, like an itchy static cling.
I searched almost constantly to find ways to scratch it. This looked like visiting farms, hiking any park I could find, spending time with people who are neurodivergent (or have differently working brains), teaching, baking, cooking, pouring over Mother Earth News Magazines, buying books on farming from garage sales, second hand stores, and book shops, taking courses on farming, gardening and the like. Searching, itching, scratching.
Along with finding ways to scratch the itch, I was housekeeping too. A lot of things have to be put in their places in order for first generation farmers (or those of us who fight to acquire land after our ancestors left it for the city) to have any success. The biggest hurdle in our journey to the farm was finances. Chris and I graduated undergrad school with three majors and a minor between us, and Chris went on to get a masters in divinity, too. That’s a lot of post secondary education and we had the mountain of student debt to back it up.
Everything felt like it took so long and there was never enough of what I needed to actually do the thing. Sounds hopeless, right? Many times in my waiting periods, I have given into the feeling of hopelessness. But then a light bulb went off and I had mindset shift. I realized it isn’t hopelessness. We are a people built to wait. How do I know? The whole time we were searching, working, and waiting and I had that “itchy” feeling I came to understand that the “itchy” feeling WAS hope. Hope you feel when you’re on the cusp of something big. Hope that pushes us toward action. Waiting and sitting are not synonymous. There are so many things you can do in hopeFULNESS. How can we be hopeless when we are so full of the thing itself?
If twenty years full of hope, itching, and action have taught me anything it’s that hope is relentless. I thought when I graduated college and got married I would feel put together. I didn’t. I thought when we retired our student debt and found the farm the itching would stop. It didn’t. I thought all my work and time spent renovating, lovingly tending the land and our animals would satisfy the yearning in me. No again. And just when we get to to the next big thing or think we’ve crossed all the items off our to-do list, another one will crop up. Because we are and will always be waiting for something. From the smallest of tasks crossed of the to-do lists to the largest of life’s events, I believe we will still be waiting with that itching fire of hope in our bellies because we are hope-filled, purpose-filled, relentless people on a mission to do better, be better, build better. After all, our sure and certain hope as Christians is a step beyond this world so why we would think our waiting here will be satisfied? So, as for me and my house, we will worship in the itching hope-filled times. We will worship while we wait.