“Summers! Summers!” somebody was yelling as we walked into the Heritage Homestead Fair near Waco, Texas. We were visiting an Amish-type farm and craft event with some of our kids the day after Thanksgiving. Who could be calling us? Turns out they were calling our son, Jamie’s family, who was staying with us and other family members in Waxahachie, Texas. It was their Houston best friends! Neither family knew the other would be there that day, but they were the first people we met! It’s a four hour drive from Houston, so what were the chances they would run into each other at that moment in a throng of hundreds of people?
We had met their friends on several occasions and were delighted to finally see the latest additions they had made to their family: two little girls from China, ages two and four, the youngest having arrived only a few months ago. An older girl of six or seven had been adopted from there a few years back, adding to their original family of four children. The Chinese children were startlingly beautiful, with their porcelain skin and jet black hair framing doll-like faces. Their own red-haired daughter says she is big sister to my titian-haired baby granddaughter, Maddie.
We had a wonderful day at the Fair, watching a demonstration of corn being ground by a horizontal propane engine into cornmeal (fine), grits (coarse), and chicken feed (rough chop). Then we toured a working water wheel grist mill and saw the grain ground by a mill stone. Of course, we had to buy products from there, including cookie mix made from milled oats and sorghum syrup from cane. We saw a farming demonstration of a pair of mules turning the soil with a plow guided by a farmer on a two-wheeled spring seat.
Mules later pulled a big hay wagon we rode on to tour the property, the high point of which was when we were allowed to dismount the wagon to view a scenic overlook high on a bluff. The bucolic scene below of neatly laid out fields and pastures with a cozy farmhouse tucked in one corner was enough to make one want to join the religious community.
In the crafts pavilion, we were fascinated to see the journey of flax and cotton through a carding process, curled into a spool that would be placed on a spinning wheel to be spun into thread. Then we could see the thread being woven on a loom into dish towels. The residents of the community made the everyday essentials that can be found in any home: dishes, brooms, baskets, furniture, clothing, linens, boots, and food products. They portrayed a simple, wholesome, if somewhat cloistered, Christian lifestyle. In their plain, modest clothes and cosmetic-free faces, everyone seemed peaceful and happy. So refreshing to us in our hurried outside world.
But Jesus didn’t call us to come out of the world, but to go into all the world and preach the gospel. Although the early church tried the communal lifestyle in the beginning, they were soon scattered by persecution, inadvertently spreading the gospel with their dispersion. Jesus said in Matthew 5:14-16, that we are the light of the world, and a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Preserving the old ways and living a simple life style are admirable, but we can be salt and light wherever we live, even bringing a bit of the mission field home with us, as in rescuing orphans from China. It is His world, and he has us sprinkled like salt all over it, sometimes bumping us into each other in the most unexpected places.
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