Why Are We Doing This, Anyway?

I have to remind myself on days like today. The wind continues its assault with gusts reaching 60 MPH. Dust hazes the cloudless sky. Everything is parched Why in the world are we struggling to grow food, milk goats, raise chickens, gather eggs, when everything, except the raw goat milk, is available just a car trip into town? Are we crazy for “doing it ourselves” when we could arguably spend about the same amount, or in some cases, even less, to buy the produce and protein we consume? Why are we devoting so much time and energy to doing for ourselves what can be bought?
This is not an ideal environment for growing food or raising farm animals. Granted, just a few decades ago this very land on which I now reside was a dry-land pinto bean farm. This whole valley used to be the “Pinto Bean Growing Capital of the World” and proud of it! The farmers out here simply plowed their fields, planted their beans and waited for the early rains to sprout them and get them up, and the later rains to grow them to harvest.

That all dried up beginning in the fifties. It was over and done by the seventies. Drought came and changed everything. The farmers tried to hang on. They dug deep, expensive irrigation wells and pumped alkaline water out of the ground to water crops that preferred the soft, nitrogen rich water from the sky. Ranchers raised fewer and fewer head of beef cattle on larger and larger acreages. Gradually, they sold out, went bankrupt, moved away. Just a handful of the “old timers” are left here, now. The Town of Edgewood incorporated around one of the last ranching and farming families in this area, when they refused to be a part of the new town.
And then, ironically, they sold out to Wal-Mart! Yes, Wal-Mart. In a surreal turn of events, the very rancher who decried the loss of his lifestyle and bowed his neck in protest by refusing to sign on and become a part of the new age of subdivided ranches turned into new towns, sold out to the highest bidder, after all. Where cattle grazed and antelope roamed now sits a Wal-Mart Super Center; paved paradise turned into a parking lot.

Still, this area of arid New Mexico is accustomed to receiving about 12 inches of moisture each year. We usually get about six inches of rain in the spring and during the late summer monsoons, and enough snow in the winter to account for the other six inches of moisture.
It gets cold, but rarely dips below zero. The wind blows in the spring, as it does in most western states, sometimes furiously. It’s just a fact of life.

But this spring feels different. The weather is crazy all over the country. The whole world seems in turmoil. Earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons are ravaging parts of the world to which I have never given much thought, prior to seeing the suffering faces on the news and in the paper.
And right here in the good ole safe USA, tornadoes are putting peoples lives through the blender of destruction, floods are ruining homes and crops and lives and drought is sucking the life out of the rest of us. The Earth is growling her warning. Her lips are curled in a defensive snarl.
She is rumbling her displeasure and spitting her anger.

I look to the sky daily and wonder if this could be the day when HE returns to claim His own and His Earth. No man knows the date or time. All things foretold have been fulfilled. The last sign is simply His coming, which He has told us will be sudden, without warning, apart from the signs of the Earth. And so I wonder, daily, nightly, when the wind howls and the sky is angry and the nightly news reports our Mother’s latest tirade and tantrum against her spoiled and uncaring children. Is today the day? And if so, that answers my question.