The Best Prize

Here I sit, with dirt under my fingernails.  I smell of dirt and sweat, and my legs are stiff from a long horseback ride yesterday and multiple treks to the woods today. 

I wouldn't trade that feeling for the world.

(However, I also wouldn't trade the feeling of a nice cold shower in summer.)  

I spent today doing what I love - farming.  That is, if farming means chasing chickens and lugging sheets of rotting plywood around and smelling the lilacs by our border.  

snowshoe - my garage sale chicken, currently molting.

i cleared that path through the wreckage of an ex-fort today.  i would have done more but there were fumes of rotten wood and...maybe....a dead skunk....

It was raining earlier, but now there's a warm, almost tropical breeze blowing in from who knows where.  We got the garden planted, got the chickens into the orchard, my brother mowed the lawn, and I cleared out the stuff you see in the picture above, as well as hand mowing a little.

I feel sorry for anyone who hasn't learned how to love work.    Remember, it will be hard before it will be easy.  You have to just jump right in and get started.  (Even if you're jumping in to a tangle of raspberries up to your waist.)

  

So go on - I dare you.  Go work 'til your back aches, get your hands dirty, tie up your hair and roll up your sleeves.  Work for God.

Colossians 3:23 - Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters [...]

I make that a double-dog dare.

- Ellyn