Rubadubdub

Rub-a-dub-dub

Three men in a tub, And who do you think they be? The butcher, the baker, The candlestick maker, They all jumped out of a rotten potato! Turn 'em out knaves all three.

Not to turn you toward childish prose (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but as an object lesson toward economic modality, I wanted to touch upon the subject of trades, home economies, and ways of living outside of the ‘norm’ or standards set from industrial age to the service sector economy as it pertains to sufficiency, labor and hearth.

I enjoyed pick up a copy of “Henry and the Great Society” over at Cumberland Books several weeks back after reading Chad’s Post on the material and related comments elsewhere. Always grateful when I can read something that challenges my thinking and makes me consider my ways.

Some other titles that I’ve had the pleasure to read relating to this topic were R.C Sproul Jr.’s “When You Rise Up” and “Family man, family Leader” by Phillip Lancaster as they began the thought I was having of what it means to provide for ones family and raise up children in a manner best suited to ones desire to honor God in our life and our relationships. It is with that pretext that I attempt to approach this topic as it relates to our family.

So to have others contributed greatly to our thinking such as KS Milkmaid, who helped inspire the beginning of our writing (my wife has begun her own work here) and as recently as Herrick’s contribution to our thinking of what home is as well as many others – if I were to name them all it would become the forward of a book, rather than the beginning of a blog post. So I’ll abstain in lengthier mentions and due credits.

As the saying goes, those who can’t do – teach, those who can’t teach –administrate and those who can’t administrate –legislate: to which I’d add, to those who can’t legislate –arbitrate. Knaves, the lot of them! Now I use this stereotypical axiom to make a point and not to disparage individual personages, obviously this consideration wrongfully applied to individual actions does more to apply heat rather than light if addressed improperly. The focus for my use can be found at it’s beginning, or if you will, what we do as a means to our own sufficiency.

The very thought of which begs the question of do we understand the term –sufficiency. I personally like the definition of the term, as I see it best applied to this consideration:

Sufficiency - Adequate means to live in modest comfort.

Taking a day or two to think about what that means and applied to ones own life, you might find that in comparison our goal or ideal is far a field from our practices. Surely it is a definition lost to or unfamiliar in our modern culture. Who cannot when reading that over, and over again give proper pause to consider and reflect on what is enough. Most posed the question, can we ever have “enough” would respond with a resounding NO! That by reference is the essence of the consumeristic mindset of our generation, and the habits and practices we daily engage ourselves in as a nation of consumers. There are untold volumes of information written on this subject or idea alone. A book read twice by me and now due again for a thrice, “Your Money or Your Life” addresses the concept of enough in well thought out terms. Good enough for this agrarian.

The final part of the equation is home – what it is, out of necessity what is required and what is accomplished by it. My thinking on this subject is far from complete or clear and somewhat linear and Americanized to a degree. Pardon it as a work in progress and be gentle in its critique. Somewhat like Google’s model for applications – its in beta testing – out there, but not always functional. So on with the show.

I’ll break this topic out in to three separate posts, this being it’s introduction, the following will be The Butcher, The Baker and (you guessed it…..) The Candlestick Maker. Then I’ll conclude (maybe) with some final thoughts which I’ll entitle The Rotten Potato. Stay Tuned…….