A Promise

 

Well, here in the Southern Hemisphere we’ve reached the shortest day of the year (today, the 21st). From now on, the daylight should slowly begin to get longer and longer.

And yet it seems like we’ve barely passed summer.

I suppose the fact that I worked all summer—and quite a few days each week—would make a difference. Also, with the dry, hot summer we’ve had—and the very warm autumn until a week or two ago—it seemed like summer was a lot longer than usual.

My brother owns several turkeys. The turkey to the far right is by far the youngest—and the noisiest.

Even though I usually hate winter—most particularly the cold and the short days—I’m slowly finding that in some ways I actually like it! There are things like being able to have time to sit down and work on a crocheting project, or listen to a story, or even do a bit of real book work are all very, very, nice. I’m also enjoying having longer evenings—with it getting dark earlier, Mom is inside earlier, which means supper/tea/dinner at 7:30 or so, as opposed to 8:00 or a bit later.

Apparently there are a few perks to winter. :)

Summer this year was—as I said—incredibly dry. Our area was especially affected—up until last week, we’ve probably had at most 10 mm of rain since January—and we’ve had quite a bit of trouble feeding our animals because there just isn’t any grass. Many farmers around here had to begin feeding out hay in April (the equivalent of October in the Northern Hemisphere). I’ve heard of more than one instance where farmers were putting out a thousand dollar’s worth of food each day to try to keep their stock fed.

Many farmers have had to sell off stock—lots of cattle and sheep have been shipped out of the area this summer.

But, praise the Lord, we had rain last week! All in all, I think we had just over 22 mm (about 1 inch). It was such a blessing to see real water falling out of the sky!

And today, on the way home from church, as I was watching the sunset, I saw two new lambs and the cutest black-and-white calf ever.

I’m sure we haven’t seen the worst of winter yet—we still have two months to go before spring comes. But these—the new babies, the rain—are beautiful promises of hope to come.

“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” — Lamentations 3:22–23

How have the recent months treated you?
– Esther

P.S. I’m blogging fairly frequently over at Purposeful Learning these days—come join me, if you have some time! Thank you!