We’ve just ended a very wet “wet season”. Most days we get 5 to 6 inches of rain. The ground seems more liquid than solid, and trees are falling down all over the place. If you ever want to visit us, avoid the wet season like the plague. May through to October are awesome, but go to California for Christmas! Here, with mud squishing between your toes, and the bed sheets smelling cheesy, and your autistic son going stir crazy inside while it’s pelting down outside, it can be depressing. We fight the depression by playing cards a lot, eating a lot of great food, listening to music and watching movies, but working outside is not as much fun as usual. Still, it is a challenge and it has to be done. In fact there is more to be done than usual. It’s dangerous too. Today I was cutting down a tree standing on a slippery slope thinking that if I slipped and fell whilst my chainsaw was running…I could seriously hurt myself. But God is good! He’s amazing actually.
One of the things that I find tough is living in a house that was never meant to be permanent and has a few design flaws. In the wet season, it leaks, is hard to keep clean and is a habitat for toads. There is a lot we could do (like build a new house up on the hill, with a view) but it all costs money to do, and money is always scarce, especially in the wet season when the sheep are too small to sell and the bees are not making honey. So we do what we’ve always done, we take the few pennies we have and we slowly patch and repair and improve what we have. It’s taking time, but one day, we might even turn this place into a reasonably decent home!
There are a lot of themes in the life of Cegu Valley Farm, but one of them is the benefit of “Delayed Gratification”. Something my folks used to talk about a lot. People in the Western World today have pretty much forgotten what this is thanks to the invention of the trusty credit card. Everything is so immediate. I want, therefore I look up on Amazon and tomorrow it arrives. But here on the farm, as in much of the developing world, credit cards are not an option. They are very hard to get in Fiji unless you can prove you are a pretty serious wage earner. There are money lenders, but you don’t want to go there, because the interest is incredible.
We have a loose policy at Cegu to just not get into debt. It helps me sleep at night knowing that even if I don’t have much, what I do have is all paid for and I don’t have to waste my time in some silly job I hate just to pay the bills. On the farm, we always have something to eat, so that’s taken care of and I can just work on building something good. If we don’t have the money, we do without it. It’s part of what it means to live by faith. We believe that there is a Plan for our lives, there are milestones we need to reach, and there is a Guide. If He has not provided it, we don’t need it yet. Everyone wants to shortcut God, and have it all today. There are a number of reasons why this can be bad for us. Mainly, we may just not be “big enough” in who we are yet to handle that desired thing. We need to go through a maturing process first. Develop a little character. I cannot count the number of times that I wanted something only to be thankful later that I had not got it. Maybe it would have hurt me, created stress, been too hard or expensive to maintain, created an addiction or quickly become obsolete.
We’re always getting comments from people, you could do this or that to improve your lives. Yes, there is a lot that could be done here. Are we where we want to be yet? No, not yet, but we are getting there. How long will it take? Maybe our whole lives…it’s all about the journey isn’t it? One thing I can promise you though, it that I never get bored. Never ever.
Chuck