Cooking with pumpkin

Mum had an abundance of pumpkins to harvest this autumn, as you do when you plant your seeds on what was once an excellent compost heap!

We have been meaning to have a "pumpkin party" so we turned my sister's birthday into a pumpkin feast! First course was pumpkin soup with pumpkin and herb bread. Mum did a fabulous job on both counts.

Second course was Dave's pumpkin and spinach risotto with garlic bread.

For dessert we had New England pumpkin pie (with maple syrup, yum, yum) and pumpkin and date cake. Mum made the cake, and I made the pie.

The amazing thing was that I didn't feel like we ate pumpkin all evening! Each course had pumpkin as a main ingredient, but each dish was so different that it was not in any way monotonous.

What about you? What do you like to cook with pumpkin?

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Fearless Motherhood

Hannah asked for a son, and in the next breath promised to give him up to God's service if her prayer was granted. Hannah's story in 1 Samuel is the springboard for Janet Parshall's discussion of motherhood in the fifth chapter of Voices of the True Woman Movement. Janet says of Hannah "She let go of her own plans. She knew God was in charge, not her. " I became a mother after my own desperate pleas to God for the gift of a child. I am certain my desperation had not reached anything close to the pain Hannah felt. However, it was real to us and as a result we named our child Elnathan to mean "God has given". My husband's prayers were always added to with a second plea: please give us a child who will follow You.

Since becoming a mother, I have thought a lot about the fact that it is easy for family to become an all-absorbing end in itself. I once heard Francis Schaeffer say that our age pursued the two "terrible values" of "personal peace and affluence". If it is wrong to pursue these as the highest goals for ourselves, surely it is equally wrong to pursue them on behalf of our children? There is nothing wrong with living in peace, or enjoying prosperity. However, these must not be our primary goals for ourselves or our children. The purpose of the family is to further God's kingdom. We must exist for more than ourselves, and our family must exist for more than itself. If our primary goal is pursue God together, our love for family and our commitment to God's kingdom need never be in conflict. I must be open, however, to that working itself out in ways that may challenge my ideas about the "good life". If our family or my child is called to live in a place that is not as safe, or give up financial security, I must never stand in the way. My child is called, just as I am, to prioritise God's kingdom over personal peace and affluence.

The primary barrier to this type of living is fear. It is fitting, then, that the following chapter of Voices of the True Woman Movement is dedicated to exhorting women to overcome fear! Karen Loritts shares her struggles with fear and how she developed strategies to overcome. She wrote, "I put fear on notice that it could not make me its slave, forcing me to do whatever it demanded of me." For those of us prone to fear, motherhood is a minefield of them! I face mine daily as I am tempted to be anxious about birth, breastfeeding, back pain, and whether I'll conquer my one-year-old's tantrums. I agree with Karen that one way we can overcome fear is to talk to ourselves. What she means is that we need to choose God's truth over the lies that swarm in our minds. The key is surrender to God's truth and His choices for us. I cannot say it any better than Janet Parshall does: "motherhood is actually one of God's refining fires. The reality of motherhood is that it's a place to learn surrender, letting go, trusting and believing that God is God." I anticipate that the rest of my life will be full of opportunities to learn this lesson of fearless motherhood.

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For such a time as this

Have you ever wished you had been born in a different time period? I have. People have even suggested that I might fit better in the eighteenth century. As one friend half-jokingly said, I love children and want lots of them, I like to cook and make things, and I think abortion is bad. Surely I was born in the wrong century? Particularly as I began to question feminism, I wondered if I could ever live out these new-found but old values in this time and place. Surely life would at least be easier if I had been born a few centuries ago?

Nancy Leigh deMoss uses the fourth chapter of Voices of the True Woman Movement, "for such a time as this", to challenge thinking like this. She encourages readers with truth from the life of Queen Esther in the Old Testament. This quote sums it up: "Whatever your season of life, your marital status, your vocation, your natural gifting, you have been given privileges, opportunities, and a place in the kingdom - the kingdom of man - at this time, to be used to further the Kingdom of God."

I have been thinking about some of the ways we could even be more useful in displaying God's glory because we live now, in a time when many of our values are questioned or despised. If you are a Christian woman born in the second half of the twentieth century, maybe you were born to:

• Delight in relationship with God, even as society around us embraces unbelief and ungodliness
• Build up the church even as church attendance reaches all-time lows
• Display contentment in the midst of materialism and envy
• Honor and obey your husband as marriages around you are riddled with anger and gossip
• Create a beautiful, productive and orderly home even when most believe your job description - "homemaker" - is a joke
• Serve God with your single years instead of pursuing frivolity and selfish ambition
• Cherish the gift of children although many view them as burdens, and think having many of them is foolish

Wow! We have no idea of the effect we can have as we seek to be faithful in our time and place. As deMoss writes, "the natural, visible story is not the ultimate story." You were born for such a time as this, to build God's kingdom and display the beauty of the gospel. Your story and that of every Christian is "really about God and His agenda, God and His aims, God and His purposes."

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Settling chickens into their coop

Here are our new chickens, which we've named Harriet, Plenty and Daffodil! They are young and will later develop red crops. Settling them in has not been as easy as we anticipated. We thought it was just a matter of leaving them in their coop for the first week or so, but we discovered that they don't seem to know how to use a ladder! Dave ended up having to catch them and put them into their house. Since then only one has ventured out again! "Stupid" has been a word we've often used of them in the last few days! Whatever brains they have must be very addled due to their car journey and the shock of having a noisy baby in the yard. We are very pleased with them though, and have discovered that watching chickens is one of the simple pleasures of life. Sunday afternoon was unseasonably warm and we loved sitting in the yard watching the bock bocks as Natey calls them.

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Garden baby quilt

For the last five weeks or so I have been working on a quilt for our new baby, which represents the abundance God has given us in our garden. To me, it also represents God's abundant blessing to us in giving us a second child so soon after the first! I still have finishing touches to do on most blocks, and am trying to work how the blocks should be placed. I will post a better picture when the blocks have been sewn together.

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Preparing to pick up chickens

There is great excitement at the Drew Patch this morning as we prepare to get our chickens this afternoon! The long awaited and much spoken of day has arrived!

 Nate enjoyed inspecting the house.

Then it was time to put in the hay and arrange the perch and ladder.

Dave has done a fantastic job of building the house, and we are looking forward to testing out the design.

We have also prepared their food and water. Pictures of our new residents will be forthcoming.

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We've come a long way, baby

This week I saw several faces of feminism at a community lunch held up the road. Taryn*, a quiet and sweet unmarried mother of two, told me she was six weeks pregnant. Taryn hopes the pregnancy will get off to a better start this time. She was "on contraception" when she conceived her prior two children, and found out about the pregnancies later. The director of the community center were I met Taryn was also at the lunch, a forty-something mother of pre-schoolers who has her kids in care while she works four days a week. She also has a teen son, and was a single Mum of one for many years after an early divorce. The politician seated one place down from me is also a Mummy, but working from seven in the morning till late at night never leaves her with time to pick the kids up from school. Judy, across the table, is there with her "partner", a friendly-sounding guy with a building business. Once you look feminism in the face, you begin to see her everywhere.

In 2001 I was deeply grieved to see women rallying to make abortion freely available. This was the catalyst for a long journey of thought about feminism and what it means to be a woman. At university I studied a Bachelor of Arts, and feminism was taught in every subject area. So when I came to the chapter on feminism in Voices of the True Woman Movement, "We've come a long way, baby", I didn't think I would learn much. However, I was refreshed in my understanding of the impact of feminism. I was reminded that prior to the 1970s, it was rare for a woman to get divorced, have children out of wedlock, work outside the home when she had children, remain unmarried into her late 20s, or have an abortion. Homemakers were considered essential. Imagine a society where "living together" before marriage was so rare that statistics for this phenomenon were not recorded! Now Christian women, like the wider culture, reflect the dominance of feminism in their life choices.

Since the time when I was confronted with and rejected feminist thought, I've sought to act in an opposite spirit. Feminism "liberated" women to pursue careers and have young children. Post-feminist society has deemed the role of a full-time homemaker irrelevant and unnecessary. I've taken delight in calling myself a housewife, with no excuses. Feminism presents children as a threat to a woman's life, and planning them as a necessity. I have longed to welcome children as God's gifts, whenever and in whatever numbers they come. Often, I have been confronted with my sin. Submission does not come easily. Pride, rather than love for God, has sometimes been a motivation. At times I have desperately hated what feminism has done to our society, culture, and family life, especially as I see its effects in the lives of my friends. "We've come a long way, baby" was a helpful reminder that we must allow God to define us as women. While it is good to reject feminist influenced choices, that is not the essence of true womanhood. Rather, "The heart of true womanhood is to understand and agree with the purposes of our Creator".

 *All names have been changed.

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