Why?

I am about to turn 61 years old in a few days and I have spent my entire life in a city. Why at this age would I change everything about my way of life and the place I am living in, and uproot myself into a rural county of an entirely different state? That is going to be a very challenging undertaking, physically and emotionally, simply to move there, not to mention all the things that would come next. Why do it?

I have dreamed of moving to a small farm or homestead since long before I clearly understood why or had a clear reason to. I have childhood memories of my grandmother's relatively humble homestead, that have loomed far larger than the actual amount of time I spent there. The smell of animals, the taste of fresh mint that grew under what used to be a chicken coop. The smell of breeze through the pines.

I have all sorts of reasons NOW for wanting to move to the country, but before that it was primal and emotional. Dallas was always my home, but Far East Texas was a place that felt like home in a way that Dallas never did. It was my Eden. I always breathed easier once I crossed the invisible border that separated the piney woods from my part of Texas. I was coming home. I got that same feeling crossing the State border from Oklahoma into Western Arkansas, the Ouachita country. Lakes like East Texas, but prettier ones. Same pines, but with larger hills rather than the softly rolling hills of East Texas. A whole national park at the doorstep. Like East Texas, but better.

Having established my emotional reasons, what are my practical reasons?

I remember living through the recession of the Seventies and the 2008 crash. I know that jobs could change or become unavailable, prices could change, money could devalue. I know that such events can endanger not just people's prosperity but their actual survival. Even those who could be able to physically survive through the worst aspects of such upheavals, often don't survive for other reasons. There is a huge opiate problem in this country for a reason, and people die from it. The reason is that when people don't have anything enduring and they perhaps don't have the one and only true Rock that is the Lord, their sense of personal worth is destroyed and they just want the pain numbed. Many lives are based on the false values of this society, and their trust in those values lets them down.

What are real values? The Lord, the land, what you need, those close to you. What did Adam have in the garden? The Lord, the Garden (the land,) Eve, that was it. Nor did he need more.

I also know that the way that humans have been treating the land is dead wrong. We pave it over, fill land and waters and sky with poison. We use coal ripped from living mountains to power our stuff. People talk about "save the rainforest" and they should, but the most damaging thing we do to the land is industrialized agriculture. I don't want to have to eat anymore from a way of farming that destroys the world. It's bad for the land: it's also probably bad food too.

I can't change government policies: what I CAN do is change the way I live. Both because that is the morally right thing to do and as an example. If I can do it, an old man, almost no one can say they CAN'T. I haven't done it yet though, I am just about to start looking for land. A few things to tie up here in Dallas first.

I am also much aware of the great overarching story of the Exodus in the Bible. Finding the land that G-d will give me. Leaving Egypt, a place where false gods hold sway. False gods hold sway in our cities no less than Egypt. I am also very aware of the price that you pay if you turn back from the Promised Land, pine for the cucumbers and fish of Egypt. As it says in Numbers:

"Your carcasses will fall, in this wilderness."

This is repeated 5 times in a row in the Book of Numbers. The price of turning back from the Promise. Of not trusting G-d.

And yes, I think the modern world generally IS Egypt. Cities are Egypt. America is Egypt. And like Egypt, curses will fall on them sooner or later. I'd rather be out in the country eating from the produce of my own hand and G-d's providence when that happens. Sleeping in a house I own, on land I own. Able to provide food, warmth, power and even water for myself, without depending on a human system.

I am also mindful of what 2 Cor. paraphrased from Isaiah 52:11 and Jeremiah 15:17:

"Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord.

Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you."

Well, postmodern urban life is unclean in more ways than I can take note of here. I am checking out of it.

Make Haste from Babylon.

I will be going land-shopping probably next month, I will keep this blog updated about that as I am able.