Sunny Days...

If you live anywhere near the Ozarks today you are probably joining me in mourning the change in weather.

A winter storm warning in March is nothing out of the ordinary for Southwest Missouri but is a little hard to swallow after two days of 60+ degrees and sunshine.

So as I sit here watching the mix of rain and frozen precipitation fall, I am trying to hold onto the events of the last couple days to get me through this dreary weekend.

Here are some highlights:

Yesterday Ethan and I along with a Dwight & Bryan Nyberg and Steve Crawford worked on painting the outside of a house.



It was a lot of fun just to be outside and I even got a little bit of a sunburn. That and a few aching muscles are helping me remember that maybe the sun will come back out:)

Then last night, our family and several others gathered at the Beltz house for dinner and a friendly discussion on sustainable living. And a little bit of frolicing outside!

I tried to catch a picture of how the static electricity made our children's heads look like dandelions in the setting sun!



It was an incredibly refreshing time and, as David Beltz said, makes us wonder why we don't make more time for "important" things like that gathering!

These last few days and about a thousand other things in our life keep making us long for a simpler way to live.

We recently read Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Farmer Boy, and it, oddly enough, has worked hard on my worldview.

Things like how Father Wilder saw his responsibility as a parent to use every opportunity to train his children - even at very early ages - to be the best kind of adult. Even if that meant they didn't go to school sometimes if there was a more important life lesson at hand. Which was part of why Ethan helping us with that house yesterday was so meaningful to me.

Another view-changer was Father Wilder's philosophy that the best way to live was to be able to supply everything his family needed with no reliance on outside sources. He said that he didn't want to live in bondage to a business or a boss, but preferred to work hard to be his own boss.

While I tend to think there still must be an element of proximal community to truly make life "the way it should be", this thought process really challenges the paths to "the way things are" living I see in our world today. How much do we want to let services from corporations and conveniences that we bought with money we don't have keep us in bondage to a certain level of income?

So these are my almost-connected musings as I'm stuck inside today;)

How about you? What are you doing with your dreary Saturday? How did you spend your couple days of sunshine? And what is challenging your worldview right now?

God bless.