Three years ago today we got the shiny new keys to our not so shiny new house, and moved thirty minutes inland from what had been home for both of us for many years prior - Newcastle. Shortly after we moved in life began to shift, and has continued to shift slowly, but continually ever since. The many little and big shifts over this last three years have culminated in what I can only describe as a complete metamorphosis.
The list of things we do now that we didn't do before moving here is long, lots of little, big and sometimes unintentional changes, like keeping chickens, which kind of just happened to us when Pippa chose us (and then eighteen months later 'chose' the rooster next door...).
I am grateful for each and every change we've made here, and the roller coaster ride of learning curves that have accompanied them. We love growing our own vegetables, knowing the different vegetable plant families, how and when to plant them, and crop rotation. We love planting, tending and pruning our fruit and nut trees, worm farming and the incredible reward it is to bring back from the brink a struggling plant simply by feeding it with the free fertiliser the worms generate for us. Though I was initially not so sure, I have grown to love keeping chickens, learning what scraps you can and can't feed them and have even embraced eating the eggs, which at first was a little too real for me. We have grown obsessed with composting, and with our diet being largely plant based we end up with a bucket load of scraps most days that in time is added to our garden to help it flourish.
As I sit here and take stock there are so many changes: harvesting rainwater, saving seeds, preserving and fermenting food, propograting, making our own mulch, the list goes on. But the changes we've made here and the lessons we've learned haven't all been as practical and straight forward as memorizing plant families and chicken whispering - to focus wholly on those would be leaving out by far the biggest and hardest lessons. Here we're learning some of the big ones, like patience, trust, and making the best of un-ideal circumstances; gratitude for the simple pleasures of life, and acceptance and appreciation for the slower, quieter seasons - the seasons where you want the pace of life to be at a nice steady run, but you simply have to walk.
Around 18 months after we moved here, D and I were loaned an audio book called Choosing to See, an autobiography by Mary Beth Chapman (wife of singer and songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman). The audio book went for many hours but it was a nice evening wind down for the few weeks it took us to get through it.
At one point in her story Mary Beth told of an 'Ebenezer' in her life, a physical reminder of something God has done, and having been pondering a name for our property since we moved in we instantly loved it... Ebenezer...
So at long last, it's officially naming day, 'Ebenezer'... not because our house is anything special or we hold it in unhealthy esteem, but because special things have happened here, important changes have taken place here, hard lessons have been learned here. And most importantly, despite the last three years being not what we'd imagined they'd be, God's faithfulness has never left us here.
Psalm 85:12 The Lord will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield it's harvest.
