A holy man spoke with the Lord about heaven and hell. The Lord said to the holy man, “Come, and I will show you hell.”

They entered a room where there was a large table, and a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. The stew made the holy man’s mouth water. Each person held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their own arms that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible, and everyone sitting around the table were thin and sickly.

“Come, and now I will show you heaven,” the Lord said after a while. They entered another room, identical to the first — the pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well-nourished. “I don’t understand,” said the holy man. “Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room and everything looked the same?”

The Lord smiled, “Ah, it is simple,” he said. “Here they have learned to feed each other.”

The greedy think only of themselves.

When Jesus died on the cross, He was thinking of you!

Remember that I will always share my spoon with you.

This is the end result well, nearly the end result of our productive day collecting firewood – it’s going to keep us warm twice more – once when we stack it into the shed and then, finally, in the combustion fire. My son and husband went out to an abandoned farmhouse (with permission from the farmer) to cut firewood, and they came back with a trailer load of firewood. The wood that they cut is fallen wood – there are no trees felled during their wood-cutting expeditions.

After they arrived home, we had lunch, and then my husband put the wood through the sawbench, which saves using the chainsaw, and it is cheaper and quicker to run. He only has to sharpen the saw blade about every six to eight trailer loads, whereas the chainsaw needs to be sharpened every load. This is about a week and a half’s firewood for our home.

I think that the men folk have done an excellent day’s work, don’t you think? Praise our heavenly Father, for we are going to be warm this winter.

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.