How do we get it all done?
You’re probably asking yourself that same question. Life feels crazy sometimes, doesn’t it? Somedays our family and farm run like a well oiled machine. Most days, our life feels like a few cogs have slipped and someone jammed an extra gear in there somewhere. When everything is running as it should each gear represents one of our family members with each cog acting as that individual’s roles, responsibilities, and talents. When someone gets sick, a gear slips. When something unexpected happens, things get jammed. When the world falls apart, the whole machine goes to pot and we have to dig deep into our resources to put the machine back together, hopefully making improvements and smoothing the kinks out as we go along. That’s what happened a few months ago. Our little machine blew up, and we are still working to put it all back together. Our product demand went through the roof. Our projected output suddenly wasn’t enough to keep up with the demand. Each of our family member’s gears got taxed to the limit of what they could stand. People rubbed us until there just wasn’t any grease left to keep everything oiled and running smooth. There were times where we just wanted to shut down. • • When I was in college at the U of A, I took a required agricultural mechanics class, and it proved to be the most practical class I never thought I needed. In that class, I learned gears are actually a type of lever. When small drives big, more force is created. When big drives small, more speed is created. When Covid-19 hit and the local food demand surged, we had a big gear jammed in where a little one used to be. Our world went spinning so fast that we couldn’t keep up. Rather than just shut the machine down all together, we leveraged our resources and kept it running until we found time to make our needed improvements (we’re still working on them- continual maintenance). Dad always says, “Keep the main things, the main thing.” For us, our main things in this life are our values- our faith, our family, and our farm. What you all see from those values is our output. Underneath the surface, they are three seemingly little gears that create a powerful force. The machine doesn’t operate without all three of those values working together in that order. We’re still making improvements. We’re still finding ways to make the machine run a little smoother, but when things start running out of control we have to remind ourselves:
We hope these words can encourage you to make the improvements needed to get your life up and running again, or maybe your life is running fine, and you just needed this little reminder to keep everything operating smoothly. Wherever you are at in life, stay true to your values and use your God-given talents to be the best you can be. At the end of the day, even if we don’t get it all done, at least we can know we produced our maximum output, and we left nothing laying around in the tool box.
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Our Farm's Voice
Hello! I'm Madelaine Paige, and I'm so glad we've met. I love mornings, milk cows, and musings. Archives
July 2021
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