We had the most lovely evening with the Rolett family and the Carolyn, Jacob and Finn Gahn visiting us last night.  I love the energy around young beginning farmers.  Their sacrifices, motivation and contribution to society is just the thing I want my kids to be around.  I always love my conversations with Carolyn around the idea of providing more support for farmwives.  We farmwives lead such a challenge of a life of simplicity in a very complicated world.  I’m always left inspired wondering what I might be able to contribute to this world of farming women.

My time with these young, inspiring families reminds me of my time two evenings ago with some very inspirational women as we talked about our faith shifts and journeys.  I was blessed with an entire evening with Megan Morton first at her office talking about farm to school, then at a delicious vegan dinner, and followed up by attending the Faith Shift event with Micky Jones and Kathy .  One of the things that has stuck with me and is replaying in my mind is that rather than choosing to conform to religion, certain practices, etc. we should be focused on three main things:  Love, Beauty & Social Justice.  These are the simple things that Jesus focused on.  I’ve been able to apply this to my own life over the last few days as I think through how I spend my time and what is most important in life.


Love is easy to understand.  Beauty in our work is so important as it relates to our ability to be authentic and to create, design, grow, form things of beauty out of our hard work, creativity, ingenuity.  I’m learning to be okay with my desire to create things of beauty.  But it’s the last piece that is so important.  Social justice means that we have a desire for our efforts to meet the needs of a diverse group of people.  We aren’t conforming and limiting our ability to serve others by the necessity that those we serve being just like us.  We’re willing to listen, share, work through the obstacles and barriers of life to ensure that in the future we all move forward.  I’m sure I’ll be sharing more of my time at Faith Shift, but the idea of prioritizing beauty, love, social justice has give me much hope.