BUT, to have wood stove, this means you must have a wood SHED. And if you have a wood-shed, that means there’s wood to be stacked at some point before the cold weather sets in.
You need people to stack the wood.
That’s where I come in.
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| The task at hand |
Usually each year at some point during the summer, the Three Lovelies and I have gone out each morning and spent about an hour picking up, carrying over and stacking wood into the woodshed. It’s tedious, hard work. It IS worth it in the end, but while you’re doing it, it’s intense. We have a HUGE wood-pile which The Bud adds to each year from his runs to various local mills with the pick-up. Then our job is to take wood from the messiness of the pile and make some order and some sense out of it in the wood-shed in nice, neat stacks --this dries out the wood more evenly, protects it from the coming winter, and generally makes it easier to grab when needed.
My life has changed A LOT this year in the way of who is home on a regular basis. After over 20 years of being a stay-at-home mom, I graduated my last Lovely this past June, and all have moved on to either jobs and/or higher education. This means that most days only 1 of the Lovelies are home at any given time.
This changes our wood-stacking routine, to say the least. What used to be a 4-person job has now been “stream-lined” into a 2-person machine most days. Lovely #3 and I have been diligently working this week on getting the empty half of the shed filled up for winter. However, today being Saturday, she’s sleeping in, so I decided to go out by myself and get some more done.
Of course when I’m by myself, this gives me more time to talk to God. At these times, He usually gives me some little truth from His Word which relates to my task at hand.
What the heck can one learn spiritually from stacking wood?
Is 28:10 “For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, rule upon rule, rule upon rule; here a little, there a little.” (Amp. Bible)
Now this portion of Scripture is a bit sad, because it is really directed toward a lazy people and how they must learn, instead of entering into the rest that God wants for them (see verses 11 and 12). BUT, since all Scripture is profitable for instruction (II Tim 3:16), we can still glean something wonderful from this verse.
Just as my wood-pile is messy, and work is needed to bring some semblance of order to it in the form of the stacks in the wood-shed, so too is parenting. It’s line upon line, precept upon precept, over and over again until they grow up (and beyond?)
It can be messy and confusing at times; remember having your first baby and wondering how to stop her crying?
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| The messiness of parenting |
It seems tedious as your in the midst of it; reminders, warnings, and follow-throughs of consequences for little things like toys on the floor or arguing with siblings pay off in bigger dividends when they get to be teen-agers and adults and have to obey traffic laws or confront a co-worker.
It takes work to bring semblance of order; you need to be consistent and stop in your tracks when you see something that needs tweaking and deal with it right then. If you get into a habit of putting it off until “you have time” to deal with it, that day will never come.I know I am not finished in my parenting --I have read that in the Jewish tradition, parents do not fully release their children until they are 30. This makes a lot of sense; the 20’s can be the time when many adult mistakes are made and it would have been nice for The Bud and I to have had some parental guidance/mentoring. I see opportunities all the time for he and I to come alongside and cheer our Lovelies on and give them advice to help them make decisions. Yes, cheerleading from the sidelines now, but there’s still work involved in waving those pom-poms and doing those cart-wheels.
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| Some semblance of order in progress |
