He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? Micah 6:8

Our heavenly Father, I do thank you and give You the praise, for:~

• Providing us with Home Help to help with the mopping and vacuuming while we so desperately need it.
• My husband – he has spent much time recently cutting firewood so that we won’t go cold this winter. The temperature today means that winter is on its way, and it won’t be long before we have to light the combustion fire.
• Our children, who have been a tremendous help in and around the home and our farm, helping with chores that my husband would normally do, not expecting anything in return, just happy to help.
• Friends - blogging friends and IRL friends in particular, who have taken up the mantle of prayer for us recently, and we have been hearing the answers to those prayers. Firstly, my back was finally diagnosed with having four disc bulges (one anterior and three posterior), and the physio is now working on repairing them. Then, we have been struggling with completing the housework each week, but now we have received an answer to that prayer in the way of Home Help – praise God!
• Farm-fresh goats’ milk – our goats are continuing to supply us with goats’ milk, enough for our cooking and for drinking, too.
• Our church, whose building is going ahead. We saw the plans yesterday, and it is very functional and beautiful.
• Balmy autumn weather – I know that it has to come to an end, soon, but I am relishing the time while the days are warm, sunny and the leaves are beginning to fall.
• Sending Your Son to die in our place, a substitutionary sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Through Him our relationship with You is restored, we have access through Him to You and He lives in my heart.

Jennifer, from My Chocolate ♥ hosts Praise each week, and for this I am extremely thankful – care to join, pop on over.

Hooray – it’s Thursday, I’m already here, and today:

I’m having:~

A glass of icy cold goats’ milk in one of our Egyptian stem glasses, and this is accompanied by a couple of Ferrero chocolates – a Ferrero Rocher and a Ferrero Rondnoir - YUM!

My Glass is:~

One that my husband had before we were married, and it is a  24ct gold plated stem glass – these glasses are so delicate and very beautiful.

I’m Feeling:~

Ecstatic that my blog is working once again, and I would like to say a hearty thank you to Susan for explaining to me step by step how to back up my blog and how to schedule it to send the back up files by email each week. It’s not until you can’t access your blog that you realise how much time you actually spend on it, writing those heart-wrenching posts and think how you’d feel if it was gone, all gone! Think about backing up your blog.

On My Mind:~

The LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. 1 Samuel 16: 7

How does God see my heart?
Do I live up to His expectations?
Is all that is in my heart God-honouring, or are there areas that I’d rather He didn’t see?
Am I giving Him all of me?

In answer to my rhetorical questions, there are many areas of my life where I could improve. I don’t think that I do live up to God’s expectations, but I do strive to have a personal relationship with Jesus living in my heart. All that is in my heart – that is a big ask, for anyone, for we are told that if we even think something wrong, that we have sinned.

Today has been a very difficult day, as Thursdays in our home are house cleaning day, and with my back being sore, it has made things much harder. Hopefully, when we get help with the housework, things will become easier to deal with. I am trying to rely totally on God, trusting in His promises that He will never leave us nor forsake us, and that He is my helper, and I am also trying to glory in my our tribulations, knowing that the trying of our faith worketh patience.

Every tomorrow has two handles.  We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of faith.

What about you? How do you think that God sees you?

Thank you for stopping by to say hello and to share Tea Time with me. Ruth hosts Tea Talk each week – care to join us, pop on over to Celebrate Friendship and join in the fun.

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also:
knowing that tribulation worketh patience;
And patience, experience; and experience, hope:
And hope maketh not ashamed;
because the love of God is shed abroad
in our hearts by the Holy Ghost
which is given unto us. Romans 5: 3-5

Praise You, Almighty Father:~

• That my blog page is up and functioning once again. I don’t remember praying for patience recently, but it has been well and truly tested during the last few days. Praise God that Stephen was able to fix it, and a big thank you, also to PSD2CSS for migrating the files across properly. I also praise God that there are good friends, such as Susan, who are willing to offer their help in fixing the problems.

• For friends, who make this world a much better place to live in, friends who build us up and encourage us to look inward at ourselves, to see what God sees.

• For my husband’s relatively pain-free knee – he has been able to cut many loads of firewood recently, so that we don’t go cold this winter.

• For our children – in particular, my son, who rode three kilometres to bring my husband home with the car, and the nebuliser during a severe asthma attack. I praise Him also for my daughter’s help in cutting and collecting firewood, for she shifts all of the loose sticks so that my husband doesn’t trip over.

• For our home, which is safe, warm and comfortable and is a refuge in the times of trial.

Psalm 62:8 tells us that we need to trust in God at all times,

that we need to pour out our heart before Him,

and that God is a refuge for us.

• For warm, autumn weather, enabling us to prepare for the cold winter ahead of us.

• For farm-fresh goats’ milk, which enables each one of us to have a regular intake of calcium ( I wonder why it’s not called goatcium, when it’s goats’ milk???), and enables us to make delicious home-made goats’ milk ice-cream.

• That we have homeschooling freedoms within Australia that many countries don’t. For instance, did you know that homeschooling is illegal in Germany and Brazil, and that Sweden seeks to introduce a law stating that the only way that you can homeschool there is under “exceptional circumstances“? Please continue praying for Dominic Johannson and the swift reuniting with his parents, Annie and Christer.

The HSLDA are currently looking for families to host persecuted homeschoolers, and while we have the room, we don’t have a vehicle capable of transporting extra people, and living out here, they would need a reliable vehicle. Does anyone want to take on this important role in helping the persecuted homeschoolers? If you do, please contact the HSLDA here.

At lunch time today, we had home-made Goat’s milk Ice-Cream, and my cat simply loves Goat’s Milk Ice-Cream. His tongue grows almost double its length, and if you could only see the look on his face – he’s in pussycat heaven! He also loves Carrot Cake, roast goat and cheese, and even has his own chair - he’s sitting in it!

This is the cat that curled up underneath my hair and went to sleep the day that we picked him up, so I decided that he was the one that could come and live with us, and after we brought him home and he started to grow,  he bit and scratched anyone that dared come near him, and definitely didn’t like being held.

He is the one that was bitten by a brown snake and survived the assault, but also the one that ran away from a HUGE rat that my daughter’s cat, Moonlight, brought down for him. Moonlight was trying to teach Jeremiah how to catch rats and mice – I’m not sure that he ever did succeed.

He is the cat that sleeps on the end of my bed and keeps my feet wonderfully warm during the cold winter months, and believe me, it gets really cold here during winter – down to -8°C (yep, that’s minus eight!) during the depths of winter. During summer, he’s the one that hid under the bed every time that the ceiling fan was switched on, and would scratch, yell and cry like a baby if you took him anywhere near the ceiling fan when it was going.

He’s older and wiser now, and doesn’t mind the ceiling fans these days. When he arrives back from his nightly sojourns in the warmer summer months, he lines up for his bowl of fresh goats’ milk, and will sit and stare at you if you don’t take the hint.

He’s such a big softy these days, and very different from the little feral that we brought home.  He’s our 10½ kilogram bundle of adorable fluff – not a fat cat, just a gentle giant, and I love him to bits. There’s definitely no spoiled cats in our home!

Jeanne wrote a post the other day about how “Fresh is Best“, and this started me thinking about how we actually live on the farm. With three asthmatics, we have to be very conscious of what we eat, and pre-packaged foods contain some real nasties, such as MSG, sulphur as a preservative and loads of other additives that we really don’t need. Consequently we don’t eat  much that is prepackaged, the exceptions being yoghurt, cheese, fritz, pitta bread, tinned pineapple and mettwurst.

Kalleskes of Tanunda make a really delicious mettwurst, and we use this for home-made pizzas, using pitta bread, tomato sauce, grated cheese, pineapple, fritz and mettwurst which is our Sunday night meal. The majority of the foods that we eat are fresh, as we live on salads, fresh fruit and vegetables and our own farm-fresh produce.

In our home, we :

• Make our own bread.
• Make our own ice-cream.
• Milk our goats.
• Grow our own sheep, chicken and turkeys for meat.
• Keep chickens for eggs.

Last night we picked up our meat from the butcher’s, maybe in a slightly different form to when we dropped her off, but this sheep was VERY fat, and dressed almost thirty kilograms, which means that as live weight, she would have been about 60 kilograms. Our butcher kills and cuts up our meat, rolling the front legs into roasts, and all for $30.00. We don’t have a meat saw, nor do we have a cold room in which to hang the meat, so this seems very good value to us.

This afternoon I went out to water the strawberries, as they don’t like bore water, and one step from the strawberry trough, I nearly stepped on a baby brown snake. Now, I don’t know how much you know about snakes, but a baby brown snake is as deadly as an adult!

I let out a HUGE scream for my husband, and in one bound I was on top of the outdoor table, with my feet on top of the bench seat. Did I want to be anywhere near that snake? No way! No siree! Nope! I hate snakes with a passion, and my vocal chords certainly had their workout for this week. My husband came out and re-located the horrid thing, and I dissolved into a flood of tears. Now, why, oh why, do they have to pick our back yard to have their babies?

The strawberries are growing wonderfully well, and we actually get to harvest our fruit, now that a good friend gave us a helpful hint:~

When you plant strawberries,

make sure that you have tinsel

scattered around the strawberries,

so that the birds don’t beat you to the fruit.

AND this helpful hint actually works. We only planted our strawberries this year, and they are fruiting so well. We planted blackberries (the thornless type) last year, and this year they were badly frosted, so we didn’t expect to harvest any, but they are actually fruiting again, now. This morning my daughter and I actually had our first taste of thornless blackberries, and they are every bit as good as the variety with thorns – YUM!

This morning my daughter picked the ripe tomatoes, and they are absolutely divine – I love home-grown cherry tomatoes, as the taste of a home-grown cherry tomato is so full of flavour! There are also a few Apollo tomatoes that are good for sandwiches, as it is so fiddly trying to place cherry tomatoes onto a sandwich.

I praise God for His constant provision over us, and I am truly thankful that He constantly provides us with all that we need. Notice that I said, “All that we Need”, for He provides for all of our needs, but never our greeds. I also praise Him for keeping me safe from the fangs of the brown snake that intruded into our back yard today!

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. Colossians 1:16, 17

The recipe that we used is:

Goats’ Milk Ice-Cream

Ingredients

400 mls of goats’ cream
4 egg yolks
rounded 1/3 cup of castor sugar
2 mls of vanilla essence

Method

Place eggs, vanilla and sugar into a bowl and mix thoroughly until well combined, then add the cream. Beat again, put into freezer to cool down. Set up the ice-cream maker and pour the mixture through the mixture hole as per instructions in the book. It takes about twenty minutes to make about a litre of ice-cream.  Place the mixture into another container of about a litre capacity (to cut down on ice formation) and freeze.

In our household, we have people who are allergic to cows’ milk, so having ice-cream used to present a real problem. My daughter used to cough and cough, and snore like you wouldn’t believe when she had ice-cream, but with the goats’ ice-cream she has no problems, and it is so delicious. This is just another way for us to use the goats’ milk that we are provided with, and another step toward self- God-sufficiency.