Another Year Gone By…
I suppose birthdays are meant to make you stop and reflect, but honestly, around here they usually arrive somewhere between “Did anyone move the laundry over?” and “Why is there a goat where a goat should not be?”
Still, here we are.
Another year of life. Another year of marriage and children and business and farm animals and bills and broken things and trying to make the numbers work when the numbers are being rude. And yes, Mom, I do know about run-on sentences. This one is deliberate.
This year has been hard.
Not in a neat, dramatic, wrap-it-up-with-a-bow sort of way. More in the “death by a thousand small expenses and interruptions” way. The kind where you finally get one thing handled and then three more things wander in behind it wearing muddy boots.
We have stretched shoestring budgets until the shoestrings looked personally offended. We have penny-pinched until the pennies went extinct from the pressure.
We have made product between meals, chores, homeschool, sick kids, market prep, goat drama, late nights, early mornings, paperwork, legal cases, and all the ordinary mess of being a large family trying to build something from the ground up.
There have been days when Mad Scientist Goods felt exciting and hopeful and full of possibility. There have also been days when it felt like we were holding the whole thing together with prayer, stubbornness, and whatever packaging supplies we had left in the house.
Both are true.
I think that is one of the things this year has reminded me of. Real life does not politely line up and take turns. The good stuff and the hard stuff all pile in together, usually while someone is missing a shoe, the baby needs something, and I am trying to remember where I put something important.
Sometimes faithfulness looks like a lovely market table. Sometimes it looks like washing the same measuring cups again at midnight.
Sometimes it looks like making one more batch, answering one more message, feeding everyone again, finding clean socks, and deciding not to give up just because the day was ridiculous.
And sometimes it looks like laughing because the alternative is making direct eye contact with chaos, and nobody needs that. After all Mr. Chaos himself will, in fact, run you down and jump on you just because he can.
But we are still here. Still making stuff. Still praying over the hard bits. Still trying to figure out what the next right thing to do even is.
I am grateful for every person who has supported us this year. Every customer who stopped by our table. Every friend who shared a post. Every person who came back and told us something worked for them. Every bit of encouragement, every purchase, every prayer, every kind word.
You have no idea how much those things can matter on the tired days.
So here’s to another year.
Another year older, probably not much wiser, but definitely more seasoned.
Here’s to grace for the hard parts, gratitude for the good parts, and enough humour to survive the weird parts.
And here’s to doing the next thing God wants us to do.
Even on a shoestring. It all belongs to Him.
~The Mad Herbalist