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Hi Everyone,
You ever have one of those weeks where it seems that all you have are troubles and trials? That is the way last week has been for us but the Lord never promised us a bed of roses (well maybe He did because a bed of roses would not only be full of beauty—but also thorns). In John 16:33 Jesus says, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” We can find comfort in our trials by knowing that God has promised to never leave us and in Isaiah 41:10 He says, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” Lina Sandell summed it up very well in her hymn Day by Day:
Day by day, and with each passing moment,
Strength I find to meet my trials here;
Trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment,
I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.
He, whose heart is kind beyond all measure,
Gives unto each day what He deems best,
Lovingly its part of pain and pleasure,
Mingling toil with peace and rest.
Every day the Lord Himself is near me,
With a special mercy for each hour;
All my cares He fain would bear and cheer me,
He whose name is Counsellor and Pow’r.
The protection of His child and treasure
Is a charge that on Himself He laid;
“As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure,”
This the pledge to me He made.
Help me then, in every tribulation,
So to trust Thy promises, O Lord,
That I lose not faith’s sweet consolation,
Offered me within Thy holy Word.
Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting,
E’er to take, as from a father’s hand,
One by one, the days, the moments fleeting,
Till with Christ the Lord I stand.
Then we can rejoice that this world is not our home we are just a passing through and one of these days we’re going home where no sorrow ever come, we’ll be safe from heartaches, pain and care, cause we’ll soon be done with troubles and trials and we shall sit down beside our Jesus and we can behold His blessed face and sit down and rest a little while.
I have learned over the years that what one person calls a trial, another person may see as a piece of cake. I know that my trials could be worse than others and I realize greatly that others trials are far worse than mine—but never the less, they are trials.
It all started the Friday before when we woke up and found that we could not access our email account. We spent the majority of time from noon till 9:00 at night on the phone with AT&T and a computer tech and all we accomplished was the changing of passwords, a few emails were brought in—but nothing else. We were practically told that their business day had come to a close and they would get back with us the following week. Come Monday I was prepared to become the “Farm Secretary”, but I had to milk the cows first and then Steve and I had to strain the whey off the curds and hang the curds to drain—and in the process I accidently put the bucket down on the whey bowl and gave the floor and table a whey bath (it was the first of many messes for me last week). Mom and Steve spent there day mowing the garden with a push mower (because the rider is broke) and then they had to rake up the grass because it grew so thick and tall in just one week. Papa cleaned out the Poultry Barn bedding—compost and fertilized the pastures. I wanted to spend my day weeding in the garden but an old neck injury had flared up and I was having trouble with my back, neck and arms. When I was 15 I was running my horse down the side of the road and didn’t see a huge hole (because it was full of tall grass) and my horse flipped injuring my neck and his. So Papa forbade me from doing anything laborious until everything calmed down—which meant I was the perfect candidate to be the farm secretary since all our customers had to call in their orders because our email was out of order. It also meant that I was the perfect person to sit on the phone talking to AT&T to see if they could fix our email. I got nowhere with them because the account is in Papa’s name and not mine and security issues forbid them to talk to me. So I asked what we had to do to get it to where I could do the managing and they said that Papa had to go into town to the office, show them his ID and add me to the account.
Monday was Papa and Mom’s 48th Wedding Anniversary so I planned to have a nice dinner for them. I really wanted to make a strawberry cake, but my back hurt the worst when I stood at a counter working. I also wanted Papa to make some fresh ice cream, but he was way too hot and tired after cleaning out the compost from the Poultry Barn. I did manage to cook some nice Porterhouse Steaks, creamed peas and pearled onions (those onions that didn’t grow to maturity in our garden came in grand handy), and I cooked up some acorn squash. While I cooked dinner they did the evening chores together. Papa likes to have Mom do chores with him—but Mom does not like doing evening chores. I told her it was her anniversary and that she had best go spend some “quality” time with her man.
If it could be done with milk—we did it on Tuesday! We milked the cows, and then we creamed all 20 gallons because we had more milk than we could sell. The customers don’t mind that problem because they like cream—we enjoy the cream too, but not the extra work that goes along with it. While we were creaming, I multi-tasked and bottled the kefir. Then when the creaming was over I packaged the quark (a soft cheese made from the curds) and I bottled the whey. I then headed inside to finish making yogurt. At 2:00 it was time for the egg party—but I was excused for two reasons: I couldn’t use my arms in front of me for very long and I needed to go to town with Papa to have my name put on the AT&T account. On our way home we stopped to get 16 bags of ice to pack the delivery with the next day. We got home at 4:00 and I wasted no time in calling AT&T to see if we could get access to our email. The first lady had me on hold for a whole hour—only talking once every fifteen to twenty minutes. I finally hung up and I called another person who to my dismay I was told that I was only given permission to talk with tech support—I couldn’t change anything. Poor Papa had to come to the phone, but the man said that since he had already verified to talk with me we would have to hang up and start all over with another person. That person would not attempt to verify Papa as long as I was on the phone—sometimes “Security” rules are stupid. So I hung up the phone, Papa got verified and I picked the phone back up and we proceeded with the headaches. They then told us that Yahoo had to fix the problem. Then Yahoo told us that we were not their customer and that AT&T would have to fix it. So we called AT&T again and we talked with about five different people until 9:00 when they told us that our account was now locked from too many attempts and we would have to wait 72 hours—more or less the man had no clue how to fix the problem and wanted to get off the line with us. I then called my cousin who is a computer pro—he solves computer problems for a living. It was so nice to spend only 20 minutes on the phone, with my cousin talking to me the whole time, he took control of my computer and I could see the mouse constantly moving, I could hear him typing and I knew that he was giving me his undivided attention. No, he couldn’t fix the problem because we needed a way to verify who we were, and we only had one email address down for recovery methods—the email that we couldn’t log into. We needed AT&T to add another recovery email to our account.
I spent an hour Wednesday morning going down the list of our customers calling those who had not called us to see if they wanted to order anything. The sad thing was that I didn’t have everyone’s phone number and one of those people had emailed us there order (of which we didn’t get) and they showed up to get 7 gallons of milk—of which we didn’t have with us. To our dismay we could have sold 11 more gallons of milk if we had emails, but at least we only had two people who ended up not getting what they wanted because we didn’t get their email.
Thursday morning found us milking the cows—like we do every day, and then creaming the milk once again. Mom worked in the garden and Papa headed to town to pick up our cattle trailer that has been at the welders being repaired—almost remade because it was so rusted through in so many places. I spent my afternoon rearranging in the freezer and then Papa and I headed back to the phones to talk with AT&T. This time we were given some hope. Every time we tried to log into our email we were told “Server cannot be found on Accelerator”. We finally got to talk to someone who was knowledgeable and told us that the IT team was the only ones who could fix the problem—and that a complaint had been filed, a reference number had been assigned and they would get back with us in 7 to 10 days. Papa about died because we at first had been told 3 day, then 3 to 5 days then 5 to 7 days and now 7 to 10 days. Papa told them we had a business that was depending on this email address and that we needed it fixed ASAP. The lady agreed to speed up the process and said that we should hear back from them in 24 hours—but we never heard from them on Friday and then we had the weekend so we shall see what this week beholds. So for now we just created an email through g-mail.
While we were not getting anywhere with AT&T, we did finally get somewhere with the pound. Two weeks ago a pit bull was dropped off at our farm. He lived in the woods for the first week, and then he started to come up to the house. We didn’t want the dog because we have too much company and too many children on the farm that we could not take the risk with a pit bull. Mom called the pound and they said that it would take 7 to 10 days before they could come out but that we should not feed it or it would become our dog and they couldn’t pick up “our” dog. Mom had no problem not feeding the dog—she didn’t want it. The rest of us are dog softies and we rejoiced the day it “found” the bucket of strip out milk sitting outside the milk house. It wasn’t long before he found the duck food, and the cat food. If we put the cat food up high—he climbed and made a mess of the garage to get to it. Mom was not happy when he began to spend his days and nights sleeping on her expensive porch cushions—so she brought them inside. Then the dog found an old wooden wheelbarrow on our porch that was full of straw and he decided that it made a good cozy bed. In case you were wondering—yes, we tried very hard to shoo this dog off of our property, but he seemed to like it here real well. He might have been eating dog food at the neighbors too for one day they called to see if we had a new dog—for it had eaten two pairs of shoes on their porch. It was late Thursday morning when the dog catcher finally showed up—and she wished that we had fed it so that it would have been easy to catch. The closest we could get to the dog was when it was on our porch refusing to be shooed off. The rest of the time it ran far away from us. So she put some cans of wet food in a trap cage and the next morning the dog moved off our farm.
Friday we had to milk the cows and cream the milk once again—and then we had to process chickens. It was going on 4:00 when we got inside that afternoon and we just wanted to sit down and relax for a little while. We did—but then I wanted some water and when I came back and went to set it down on the magazine rack table it fell out of my hand and all over the pillows on the sofa and the sofa and down into the magazines and on the floor. That was my third mess for the week, for the day before I had spilt my grape juice on the tablecloth during breakfast (thankfully it washed out). When I got the water all cleaned up we did manage to relax some more and then it was time to cook dinner. I needed some butter out of the fridge and I found it to be a little too soft for being in the fridge. To our dismay the fridge had frozen over again (because I had accidently left the door open a jar for a while the day before). So when dinner was over Mom did the dishes and I spent an hour calling all our Gainesville customers to see if they had an order. Then at 9:00 we began the process of emptying the fridge and freezer so that we could thaw it out. Thankfully we have the walk-in cooler and then Papa brought over an extra chest freezer for the frozen things.
Saturday I was in too much pain to really do too much, but I had to milk the cows. Thankfully Mom could pack the orders and Steve could bottle the kefir for me. I did manage to do paperwork and Mom worked on push mowing the courtyard and around the milk house and greenhouse—where people walk the most. Later on I was feeling better and Mom and I tackled the job of washing down the fridge so that we could put it back together.
It was a week of troubles and trials—but by the grace of God we made it through and now we shall see what next week beholds.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare