Vaughnshire Farm

The use of the pen can be a powerful weapon.  

We place a high priority on learning the art and skill of the pen.  Writing is an absolute must do in this family.  While we do have structured how to lessons on writing here and there, the majority of our writing consists of letters they write to friends and family all over the country as well as “reports” they write for mom and dad on different topics…such as a summery about a book they just read.  They also enjoy writing plays and stories about knights, princesses and castles.  Another way we get writing practice is taking notes during church and if you are too little to write…you draw pictures of something pertaining to the message. 

Our hope and prayer is that we would raise ready writers who are swift and skilled with the pen.  Writers who will write prolifically, from a Biblical perspective, about the very topics in our culture that need to be addressed. 

The other day, we took a trip to our favorite Amish market to pick up some bulk food supplies.  We haven’t been since the baby was born.  We drove through a portion of a small town that we haven’t seen in over 3 months.  As we were driving, we counted a handful of small local stores that have closed up shop.  We drove past one of the little grocery markets we frequented– lights out and abandoned —and next door…. a busy Walmart Supercenter.  I wasn’t shocked.  When the Walmart supercenter came to that small rural town, I knew it was only a matter of months before this little grocery store closed.  My children on the other hand were horrified that it actually happened.  After listening to their ranting and raving over how they felt about small local businesses closing due to being swallowed up by the big corporate giant, they began to propose solutions to the problem.  My answer was “No, we aren’t turning around and picketing today” and “No, we aren’t taping up posters all over town about what we think about Walmart!” 

Our oldest whipped out his pen and notebook and said he was “going to write about this”.  He spent rest of the trip writing.  He started off like this,

Hello, We’re here to tell you about how bad Walmart is.  First, let’s talk about food.  Let’s start with eggs.  Most hens that lay eggs lay in a battery cage.  A battery cage is a cage that is about 4 square feet and has about 5 hens and is electric and there is about one dead hen every cage.  Speaking of small spaces, let’s talk about chicken mutilation…..”

How he got from Walmart to chicken mutilation in 5 sentences and where he is heading on from there I don’t know yet!  Obviously, we still have much writing instruction we need to cover here at home still.  However, it makes me rejoice when I hear my children pick up the weapon of the pen and seek to use it for good. 

When I was a child growing up, I remember hearing the voices of Marlin Maddox and James Dobson on our kitchen radio while helping my mom cook in the kitchen or clean the house.  Now as a mother in my own home, I too often listen to radio and cd’s.  I love to listen to Kevin Swanson’s radio program while attending to the duties in my home.  We appreciate the Swanson family for their unwavering, uncompromising, bold, outloud faith in the truth of the Scriptures. 

Here are a few of the latest radio programs you can listen to as you go about your daily duties. 

Demographic Winter:  Why Women Won’t Have Babies.  (We like drywall way more than we like kids!)

A demographic winter sweeps across continents, and even evangelical Christian leaders won’t face the cause of it. Women don’t want to have babies, because they aren’t raised with a vision for it. Women are raised for careers.

Well, here’s a father who is not raising his daughter for a career. He’s actually embracing God’s vision for daughters. We know it’s weird. We know it’s unpopular. We know it’s politically incorrect. But we don’t care. Because this is what it will take to save a civilization, and glorify God in the process. We’re raising daughters to be what God wants them to be, not what Gloria Steinem or even Sarah Palin wants.

Daycare - Child Abuse:  Time for a Copernican Revolution in Education

A popular children’s author has enraged mothers everywhere after suggesting that day care constitutes child abuse. But what should we say about some of the K-12 schools out there?

Now after 200 years of increasingly cold, institutionalized education, Kevin Swanson suggests a Copernican Revolution in Education. He unveils a new Education Manifesto in which the definition, goals, method, and content of education are reworked from the perspective of a biblical world and life view

The classical Greek form of education separates knowledge from life, the fear of God from knowledge, character from education, and relationships from the paideia. This is because humanism refuses to treat man as a creature of God, created in the image of God, created for the glory of God, and created to love God as a Father. In this segment of the Generations broadcast, Kevin Swanson suggests that Christians should stop borrowing from the humanists to inform their methods of education, which in the end only cripples the faith.

Raisin’ a Palin:  How To Be A Feminist For Life (Classic Swanson Style!! Excellent!)

Kevin Swanson lays out a vision for raising the next Sarah Palins to rule the country in the year 2035. Then, he interviews Scott Brown on a biblical vision for womanhood and the vision for a feminist America. Contrasts form as worldviews clash on this segment of Generations. In a country where the family has unravelled, fatherhood is MIA, where 70% of men do not achieve manhood by 30 years of age, where the debt-to-GNI ratios are through the ceiling, and the character of the nation is in freefall, will 100,000 Sarah Palins be able to salvage our institutions in the next 30 years? More fundamental solutions are suggested on this broadcast.

There are many more good titles…check them out. 

We are enjoying watching our children love and care for their younger siblings.  What a beautiful site….brothers …big and small. 

Thanks to one of our commenters who reminded us to mention Voddie’s blog.  We regularly follow his blog, but lately Dr. Baucham has been hitting the issues hard over there: 

• Evangelical Two Step
• Framing the Abortion Debate 
• Did McCain Make A Pro-Family Pick 
• Waking Up The Sheeple

If you haven’t heard Dr. Baucham speak, you must get a hold of some of his CD’s.  We especially love his humorous but bold,  straight forward messages.  It is so refreshing to hear a man, with much influence in the evangelical world, boldly defend the Word of God without compromise. 

Next up on my book reading list is his new book Family Driven Faith of which I have heard great things about.  Hopefully, I can put together a book review after I get a hold of the book. 

Over the next week, in all of our “spare time”, we will post a few more highlights of what others are saying about the upcoming election. 

As someone who writes occasionally on the topics of feminism, I can tell you that few subjects lite the back end of the firecracker like feminism.  Whenever I write an article or publish something relating to feminism or the roles of women, I just brace myself for the firing squad.  The wonderful thing about this firing squad is they don’t have real bullets…

We take a hard line stand on feminism because we believe that is one of the top major battles in our day. 

Martin Luther said:

If I profess, with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battle fields besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

I have followed the rise of feminism over the years and have learned many interesting things.  One being is that it is infective, potent and extremely deceptive.  I have had much exposure to many flaming feminist extremist and could spot them a mile away.  My family was very active in pro-life work so I grew up seeing the liberal of the liberals.  I always tried to figure them out.  I remember the first time I saw a male feminist screaming at the top of his lungs and holding a hot pink Feminist Majority sign.  I remember looking at that man trying to figure out what in the world was wrong with him…he’s a man…screaming that he’s a feminist…waving a hot pink sign…out on a public street corner.  

At that point, I had always assumed those who embraced feminism were those exaggeratedly masculine looking females who ran abortion clinics.  That day, my view of the stereotypical feminist changed.  I have since learned that feminism parades around in all different shapes and sizes.  As the Church further falls in to apathy and slumber, the fruits of feminism become all the more apparent even in the church pew. 

Feminism has invaded and infected our culture like a rabid disease.  Feminism has hooked women on the lie…the same lie the serpent hit Eve with in the Garden.  The lie of humanism.  The lie of “Hath God really said?”  The lie that you can be as God, deciding what is good and evil in your own eyes.   Feminism has gripped a hold of manhood and squeezed the man right out of him.  Feminism had mocked strong male leadership and declared it as oppressive.  Feminism has declared my rights, my body and my choice.  Feminism enslaves the very ones it has promised to free.  Feminism has exchanged truth for a lie.

While feminism in the Church may not look like the stereotypical feminist image most see in the liberal extreme, the lies of feminism are still very much alive in the Church.  And just because feminism in Christian circles may be seen as less brutal, doesn’t mean that it isn’t still the same brutal, rabid disease with serious consequences.   In fact,  so called “christian feminism” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and is a blasphemous misrepresentation of the true liberty Christ gives to His children.  Feminism can never be Christianized.  The two are entirely different roads.  

While Roe v. Wade is a horrid symptom of the major ills in our society, it is not the root cause.  Many early feminists, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Alice Stokes Paul, were also pro-life.  Many early American feminist spoke out against abortion.  And get this…..They all wore long skirts and dresses!

Just because they dressed more modestly than the average Christian today or the fact that they deplored abortion or the fact that some had more than 1.2 children did not make the feminism they fought for good.  The early feminist were anti-God because they spewed forth a venomous egalitarian “theology” defying God’s design and order.  And that defiance has led to all sorts of evil that is still wrecking our homes, churches and nation. 

There is nothing like the first female vice president nomination to quickly stir up the waters in Christian circles.  She claims to be a Christian.  She claims to be pro-family…. and a feminist.  She is pro-life and of that I can certainly agree with her on Biblical convictions on life in the womb.  But this whole ordeal isn’t about picking on one person.  In fact, the Republican and Democratic presidential races are just a picture highlighting just how impotent American Christianity has become in the last 100 to 150 years.  The fact that Christians at large are swooning over a mother of 5 who happens to have some conservative politics and is quick to place her in as 2nd in command says something about where we are as a nation…and as a Church.  This is not a personal attack on Mrs. Palin–It is very much about addressing,  like Luther said,  the ”little point that the world and the devil are attacking.” 

And that little point is huge in the future of reforming this Nation. 

I have a small collection of bad books.  Bad old books relating to the topics of feminism.  One of my bad books is called Women and The New Race by Margaret Sanger…Eugenics Publishing Company 1920.  Yes…that is really the name of the publisher!

I quickly found that when you touch the false god of feminism, it unleashes all sorts of rage.  It wasn’t until I began to delve deeply into the false religion of feminism that I began to understand why this issue wakes up a fire breathing dragon, why it is at war with Christianity and why there is no such thing as a Christian feminist. 

My small collection of bad books tells the chilling truth about those women’s rights women. 

So here’s a sample. Just a few little quotes from an influential early 20th century feminist: 

“If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for woman.  Its greatest outrage upon her was to forbid her to control the function of motherhood under any circumstances, thus limiting her life’s work to bringing forth and rearing children…”  1

“…churchmen deprived her of her place in and before the courts, in the schools…and society.” 2

…The church has always known and feared the spiritual potentialities of women’s freedom.”  3

“The church has sought to keep women ignorant upon the plea of keeping them “pure”.  To this end it has used the state as its moral policeman.  Men have largely broken the grip of the ecclesiastics upon masculine education.  The ban upon geology and astronomy, because they refute the biblical version of the creation of the world, are no longer effective.  Medicine, biology and the doctrine of evolution have won their way to recognition in spite of the united opposition of the clerics.  So, too, has the right of women to go unveiled, to be educated, and to speak from public platforms, been asserted in spite of the condemnations of the church…” 4

“It is within the marriage bonds, (the roles of biblical womanhood)…that the greatest immorality of men has been perpetrated.  Church and state, through their canons and their laws, have encouraged this immorality.  It is here that the woman who is to win her way to the new morality will meet the most difficult part of her task of moral house cleaning.” 5

“Being the most sacred aspect of woman’s freedom, voluntary motherhood is motherhood in its highest and holiest form.  It is motherhood unchained–motherhood ready to obey its own urge to remake the world.  Voluntary motherhood implies a new morality — a vigorous, constructive, liberated morality.  That morality will, first of all, prevent the submergence of womanhood into motherhood.  It will set its face against the conversion of women into mechanical maternity and toward the creation of a new race…”  6

And it just continues to go down hill from there…. 

“In their subjection women have not been brave enough, strong enough, pure enough to bring forth great sons and daughters.  Abused soil brings forth stunted growths.  And abused motherhood has brought forth a low order of humanity.  Great beings come forth at the call of high desire.  Fearless motherhood goes out in love and passion for justice to all mankind.  It brings forth fruits after its own kind.  When the womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love (i.e. planned parenthood), another Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and the stars.  There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the cross.  These and the race that is to be in America await upon a motherhood that is to be sacred because it is free.” 7 (my emphasis bold)

Feminism, my friends, is at the core anti-Christianity!  Tell me why we don’t have more Christian families boldly speaking out about the evils of feminism in our culture today?

1-  Chapter 14, Woman and the New Morality, pg. 175
2-  pg. 175
3- pg.179
4- pg. 169-170
5- pg. 170-171
6- Chapter 18, The Goal, pg 226
7- pg.234

These are the famous super buffs.  For those who haven’t heard the story…this little boy nursed these two back to health with an eye dropper of water and lots of patience. 

Our 12 year old receives a magazine subscription to Backyard Poultry.  In it, he discovered a photo contest.  Soon after reading about the contest to his brothers and figuring out they could all enter it….they were off trying to catch their favorite chickens.  

They are optimistic evidently.  The 7 year old has asked me just about every day if we have received an email yet telling him he is the winner. 

Super Buff is quite a heavy bird. 

…. loosing balance!

Well now…. we regained control and have balance.  How long can you balance a chicken on your head?

It’s been a full, busy, tough week.  While we have had many victories we can rejoice in, this past Saturday we experienced a big loss here on our farm.  We lost our milk cow, Bonnie. 

A combination of her curiosity and determination, a left open barn door and a feed bag, ultimately caused her death.  While, in retrospect, we could kick ourselves for not having the feed more tightly secured and the barn door shut tight, we did learn a lot on Saturday.  Paul and the boys spent a large part of the day trying to save her from bloat.  They even resorted to sticking a water hose down her throat into the rumen to release the air.  I was so proud of my two boys for their hard work that day…even though it was hard.  All and all, the vet said that what happened was bloat leads to toxicity.  She died before we could treat her with antibiotic shots.

Loosing your milk cow isn’t quite like having a chicken die.  We have chickens come and go on a regular basis and although they are part of our farm like Bonnie was…there are so many of them running around here and they just all blend in the chicken flock the same. 

Bonnie was our first family milk cow.  She, in a lot of ways, threw our family immediately into living real farm life!  We learned soo much from her.  Bonnie gave us lots of fresh raw milk, cream and butter and for that we were so thankful.  She was a great big Guernsey with lots of personality and attitude to boot!  People have been asking us the question…”Well, are you going to get another milk cow?”  And, Yes…we will…eventually… and we want a big brown Guernsey….like Bonnie Blue was. 

Today we were quite busy.  We took a trip to the butcher shop to pick up our meat.  We took all the coolers and freezer bags we had and still needed more…so the children ended up packing some of the meat in plastic bags and putting it inside boxes.  We froze on the way home with the air conditioner on high!

Here the boys are unloading the roller rack and packing our hamburger patties.  We are very glad we opted to have 1/3 of our beef put into patties.  They came out very nice…and are sure to be a convenience for me cooking. 

They loaded the coolers on to a roller cart to take out to the trailer. 

Almost ready to go…It took quite a while to pack over 600 lbs of meat. 

A very proud 11 year old stands by the lamb meat he raised. 

 A very busy 2 year old pushing carts. 

After a big day, we finally get the last of the meat into the freezer.  We still have a lot of rearranging to do, but at least we have our own beef, pork and lamb stocked at home in our freezers!  And Wow..that is an amazing feeling to raise your own food!  Anyone wanna buy some meat?!!

It seems like the weeks are passing even faster now.  We almost have a 3 month old who is still well shaping our world here…  Last week, he caught sight of his first chicken and followed it intently as it pecked its way across the yard.  That was exciting for us for some reason.  I guess it was something “farm like” that our 11 week old (at the time) was doing–watching a chicken.  He’s well on his way to being a great farm hand!

His personality keeps us intrigued and we are enjoying lots more smiles and laughs and fewer screaming responses.  That makes me happy!  Right now, he looks around at everything going on.  He especially likes watching his siblings and gets all happy and excited when they are bouncing around near him.  Makes him wanna get up and go — which in turn causes frustration for him because he can’t make his body just get up and go like they can…or do all the neat things they do…like sit up.