By Nicole

Last week, I was blessed with extra time one afternoon to over prepare for my Wednesday night girls group.  Because the curriculum is slightly outdated and somewhat LAME, I generally choose to redo it. I am tragically inconsistent, but every once in a while God steps in and helps me out.   We have been talking about college and career.  True to my expectations of these lessons, everything was a little too... ugh... for me.   Now, I'm an M.Ed in Guidance and Counseling, pro-college, pro-life planning, pro-education type of girl.  But I also am acutely aware of how often we package our expectations and try to align Christian values and a certain level of professional success.  Achingly upper-middle class.   I'm also a social worker, culture of poverty, social justice soapbox kind of girl... and I was kind of struggling to rectify it all.   Throughout this unit, I kept feeling like God wanted us to talk about more.... dig deeper.  Get a little gritty and real. In my n

Today was a day that will live in infamy in our home.  The day the cow escaped and we spent hours and miles looking and chasing and worrying.  The day we fell a tree into the goat fence.  The day nothing went the way we planned.  The day we wanted to throw our hands up and cuss and yell and stomp in the mud and throw tree branches and pout. Instead we were humbled and reminded of God, who works all things together for the good of those who love Him.  We still don't know when those things will start working together for good, but I guess that isn't the point. The cow is still out.  First day in the barn, and he didn't like it, so he leapt over the fence and took off.  We saw him twice and couldn't get him to go the way we wanted.  Three hours later, we tucked our tails, set out hay and drove away. Those three hours were supposed to have been spent building a second place for our two smallest pigs, moving Connor's chickens to a better spot, cleaning the house, m