Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn Week at Ranch Shekinah

Have you ever read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? If you have, then you know how simple country kids used to spend their time, and how life was in the old days of our grandparents. Kids lived outside, animals were a major part in their life, and being free to play in the woods, creek, and fields was the best part of life. These days, animals are only for a field trip, you don’t go outside any more, you stay inside with the game systems and shop in the mall. For some reason, and it might just be my weird little self, but the comparison just doesn’t match up. I wouldn’t trade one day in the country for the mall, and I don’t think any kid that has ever really played in the country would either.

 During the summer my family runs a camp for kids, and one of my passions for the camp is showing the kids the beauty and fun of being in the country. So in the winters, I spend my time planning and organizing for the next summer camps and when the weather breaks it’s like a wonderful gift from God to be able to go outside and work on getting things ready for camp.

 

 A few weeks ago, I broke my finger at a riding lesson. I was just picking up a canter when I turned a corner and my saddle slid to the side of the horse. That led to me tumbling off the Arabian lesson horse and on to the arena floor. I have fallen off a great number of horses in the last ten years that God has let me train and show these powerful animals, though I have never seriously hurt myself. Though many of the times it could have been serious, God has protected me from all harm except from ugly bruises. This time I felt as if I had only bruised my thigh and wacked my hand. When I got over the shock and laughing about it, I got up to help my trainer move the saddle back to the center of the horse, when I realized my finger was very crooked. My ring finger on my right hand was almost completely bent sideways.

 

I spent the next day running in and out of three different medical places to deal with my crooked finger. At the end of the day, it was taped and straight again. The negative part of being straight again was the taping and the seriousness of the break was rendering my right hand completely useless. You would be amazed how hard simple life chores become without the hand you use the most. For peats sake too, I’m  a farm girl! This means heavy lifting all the time, just about everything you do on a farm requires the use of two hands to do the normal chores of the day. I realized the first day how annoying these next few weeks were going to be. It took a while to reach the fullest level of torture - the lack of being able to ride my horses that need nothing else than some good work outs/training from an idle winter. Now, if I had broken something during the cold winter when you can’t do anything anyhow, or after a hard summer of play, this would have been ok. But with this break was the warmest weather during March in a hundred years, and it seemed to hit us the very day after my spill.

The reason for this post is something my mom kept telling me that week. She told me that God has ordained my weeks to be just as He wants for the next month, that I should find a good book to read and see what He has in store for my weeks. What ran through my head was, ok, yes, I really do see these weeks must be very planned out by God. Because I know my first broken bone was not some random doing of Gods but, must have a purpose I can’t see or understand. But may I wonder how reading a good book will do a lot to help anyone? My life is fast pace, tight knit work days. I work three days a week for my dad at the office, I take three different music lessons and play four different instruments, I need my right hand to write and type the plans and such for our children’s Christian camps, I bake a dozen loaves of bread a week, I have countless farm projects that don’t have time to wait anymore, and six horses to break in so that I can have them ready to be leased out to kids doing 4H in a month. I couldn’t understand why such a little bone breaking was going to leave me idle while my head spun with projects. My time was now freed up by not being able to do much, but this also made me think harder about all those projects I now had time for but was unable to do without some use of both of my hands.

Two Sundays ago, close friends were on their way back home and were going to stop by for the night. When they were three hours away from our home they called and said the transmission of their car had broke. My parents left to pick them up, leaving me at home giving horseback lessons to our neighbor’s extended family that was visiting him.

 

 The few hours of fun I imagined I was going to have with the girls of this family, turned into over a week of hard farm work and amazing memories.

I was told by my dad to not even ride on the back of the horses during this week. This one was a hard one, don’t ride but watch a whole bunch of kids ride horses during 93 degree weather. Can’t say I was seeing this as a ball of fun.  This broken finger was a real bothersome to have, but as the week went on I saw the blessing and the leading of Gods will in my life. I stopped doing everything so much on my own and started teaching other kids how to help on the ranch. I let God take the way I wanted and the thoughts of the way my week was going to go, and watched Him turn them into more productive time than I could have imagined!

1.   We washed some incredibly white black /dirty tales of  all six horses

 

1.   Cleaned all sixteen western and English saddles

2.  Cleaned all other leather tack and bridles

3.  Mucked the horse stalls

4.  Mucked the goat shed

5.  Mucked the Chicken Coop

6.  Cleaned the milk house out

7.  Swept the full size camp basket ball court

8.   Cleaned the camp dorms, missionary apartments, camp kitchen, & all six bath rooms in the gym

9.   Completely organized & uncluttered  the stable & the junk that had collected over the winter

10.               Worked and trained all the horses

11.                Put the fountain back in the lake

12.               Cut trails and grass

13.               Planned and organized a large garden

Without me riding with the girls, they were limited on the riding options. This changed our entire routine of when they come. It’s always trails , just fun and games, this time I wasn’t able to ride and they were stuck in a riding arena. I ended up giving each girl their own lessons and working on key riding habits. I taught them how to train the horses, how to train themselves to ride better, and how to help others ride. They learned so much in this one week of being at our ranch.  This was its own blessing, these girls, their parents, and their brother are a huge help in our children camps. This family has given their time so freely and have been incredibly helpful and encouraging! This year the girls are going to be even more of a blessing in helping with the camp because of their experience with the horses and knowing how the farm chores work.

The week wasn’t just a hard farm week though. It was what I imagined farm kids would have enjoyed a hundred years ago. It was something that isn’t your normal spring break for kids the ages 10 – 20 would have these days. We took each chore with pure joy and simple enjoyment of each other and our country surroundings.

We laughed,

Played simple jokes on each other,

Took gator and golf cart rides,

,

Trained horses to canter and learned to sit one too

 Made patterns up to ride groups of horses to,

Dressed up in big old dresses and rode horses,

Ate ice cream and pizza,

Played air soft with our brothers,

Practiced shooting with our brothers,

Butchered and cooked a wild goose

Played with three new born baby goats

In all, we did just about everything kids could ever want to do living in the country on a farm. This week has gone down as one of my special memories of the country, and simply it was a Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn week, or as my mom told me before “ a week ordained by God.”

 

~Rachel