Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Another look at another life

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Flicking through my emails this morning, I came across one alerting me to a comment on my last post from my fellow blogger Ian McKenzie saying:

‘You have definitely come a long way from that flat, “a mere drunken banker’s stagger from Canary Wharf.” It looks great.’

The words struck a chord and, searching back, I was stunned to learn that Ian was quoting from a post I wrote back in 2004 entitled ‘A step towards another life’. I wrote back to Ian to say how touched I am that he continues to read and staggered he could recall a post that I wrote eight years ago. Rereading that post brought me up short, for I had forgotten how deeply embedded the wish for what we know have was within me back then. 

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Canary Wharf from Mudchute Farm

We live in London, a mere drunken banker’s stagger from Canary Wharf and the new financial heart of London. We are lucky enough to have a ground floor flat with a small south-facing garden… As a child, I grew up in a home where in the back garden, my Dad grew a fair proportion of the vegetables we ate. Although this was done partly by choice, it also helped to supplement the far from stellar incomes of a self-employed engineer and nurse… Although I don’t remember playing a very active part in the actual market gardening, I do remember being captivated by John Seymour’s seminal book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. Seymour’s plain economic yet evocative prose made the backbreaking and often thankless life of a smallholder seem simple, achievable but most of all, enviable. 

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Limehouse Link tunnel – part of my 50 mile daily commute in London

I have long held the desire to have a less frenetic and immediate life, hoping instead to ‘downshift’, as it is now called. Recently, SWMBO and I have discussed a variety of ways in which we can bring this about – ultimately, to find a way in which can spend far less time in traditional work environment – nine to five, stressful work, long commute, little family time – enabling us to spend more time together working in, around and maybe from the home. Over the years and months, various bouts of online research and reading have brought us to the point where we are now seriously looking at a number of ways in which we can make this idea a reality, whether at home or abroad.

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Leaving London for New Zealand

Although I am by nature a serendipitous optimist, I am no wearer of rose tinted specs and I am realistic enough to know that a corporate salary will be a necessary evil for a while yet if we are to affect such a change.

Eight years later, we have moved 18,000 kms to the other side of the world, I have traded a corporate salary for a public servant’s payslip and the family have swapped a small inner city flat in London for a house on four acres of land in rural New Zealand.

Our lives have changed in extraordinary ways: we have challenged our own notions of who we are, slowly and steadily reversed circumstances we once thought would crush us, visited places of stunning beauty and met wonderful people some of whom have become our closest friends. 

In doing so, we have confounded those who confidently predicted failure, shed a good deal of the baggage of our past, trusted the leading we felt and committed to an unknown future with a determination we never knew we had. Though there was I time when I would have scoffed at the thought, we are certain we were called to live here and that we are meant to be where we are for however long He will have us here. God has truly blessed and humbled us – we strive to hold it all with open hands so we may share that blessing with others.

The full post from 2004 – thank you Ian for reminding me I wrote it!

Post and rail, hammer and nail

Sunday, September 23rd, 2012

I’m sick and tired of being, well, sick and tired.  Coming to the end of 14 days of antibiotics, probiotics and electrolytes, I am still not back to 100% especially where energy levels are concerned.  That said, I feel better than I did and for that mercy I am grateful. 

I’m still not feeling up to major jobs around the smallholding but, at the request of SWMBO, briefly attacked an overgrown bougainvillea with the chainsaw until my energy ran out. Looking to take things a little easier, I ventured out today to move our neighbour’s rams from the gully paddock into the large paddock.  Given the lush spring growth we have as a result of the winter rains, Larry and Garry (or is it Barry and Harry?) needed no prompting to move to new pastures and start munching.

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While they munched, I set to and did a few running repairs to the post and rail enclosures, stiles and other wooden structures around the place, so that things looking like this…
 
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…ended up looking more like this.
 
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Jobs done, I spent a while just watching our calf TJ graze along side Poppy the lamb and the chickens in the home paddock.  There’s yet to be a time when I experience such moments and fail to feel blessed to live where we live, look after the land we live on and steward the stock we have.
 
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TJ is growing in stature and confidence, increasingly happy to use her weight and muscle to push her way to the front of the feeding queue. 
 
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Poppy is just as keen to be fed first and uses her speed, not to mention her piercingly persistent bleat to inform us that we’re taking too long or have our pecking order priorities wrong. Part of our enjoyment is sharing these times with others and being a part of a community where we can connect with people, learn from them and do life together.  
 
We are blessed to have friends like John and Justine who have given us much advice, their continuing friendship and an old bench we can sit on and enjoy cups of tea in the sun; friends like Sean and Katie whose girls come to our place and ours to theirs to spend time just doing stuff like making hokey-pokey and rehearsing their dances and friends like Johnny and Michelle who walked over this afternoon to borrow some golden syrup, stopped to chat for a few minutes and ended up having a glass of wine and a few olives as the sun slowly headed towards the horizon.
 
 

And on the seventh day…

Friday, September 14th, 2012

… he rose from his sick bed and felt somewhat human again. I had such great plans. Booking 5 days’ leave sandwiched between two weekends meant nine consecutive days away from work and busy getting stuff done around the smallholding. Or not, as it has turned out.

Sadly, out of the last 10 days, I have spent the best part of seven of them in bed, on the loo or lying on the couch thinking about going to the loo or back to bed. After a visit to the doctor and some tests, it turns out that I have had concurrent campylobacter and rotavirus infections, the same stuff that killed Willow. 

With just two more days before I have to go back to work, today was the first day when I actually felt like doing anything like tackling some of the jobs around the place. So, while Wendy tackled the wildly overgrown shrubbery…

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…I slowly but surely worked my way down the drive, regrading and redistributing the metal by hand to even out the surface and smooth things as much as possible.

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I have lost a bit of weight in the last week but I hadn’t realised how much the dehydration and lack of food had taken it out of me.  Just raking and smoothing 150m of drive almost did for me so I finished off and headed back to the house to enjoy a few minutes sitting with Wendy, drinking tea and enjoying the view.

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We are still bottle-feeding Poppy the lamb but she is supplementing this more and more by grazing in the home paddock.  That said, one lamb – even a guzzler like Poppy – isn’t enough to keep pace with the Spring growth.In order to keep the grass in good order and deal to any weeds before they reproducing, I spent a pleasantly sunny hour topping the paddock.

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After a quick sandwich for afternoon tea, for lunchtime had come and gone without either of us noticing, we headed to the local rural primary school to collect the newest additions to our small holding.

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We had ordered five Brown Shaver chicks through our friend Michelle (Johnny’s wife) who works at the school.  One of the mums had placed a bulk order for local kids and parents, sourcing the chicks from the country’s major producer in Christchurch.  

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As part of a much larger consignment, the days-old chicks were flown up this afternoon, collected from another farm and driven to the school in a heated box. From there, we whisked them home to take up residence in a lamp-heated cat cage in our laundry, ending their 1,000km journey with munch of Peck n Lay and water.

Funnily enough, these little squeaking bundles of fluff were not to be the newest additions for very long.  Just as we were cooking dinner and getting ready to take the youth group to an indoor climbing centre for the evening, we got a call from Johnny telling us to get ready for another arrival.

(A) Moving house

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

The  headquarters for a well-known house moving company is in area where we live.  By that I mean a company that moves house rather than the stuff inside houses.  Occasionally, as happened this morning, my dawn commute is temporarily halted by a late finishing house move (as they tend to do such things at night when the roads are quiet).  This is what it looks like when two halves of a house pass within feet of your car at about 40kph.

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Happy 21st Birthday Ariella

Monday, August 27th, 2012

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Ariella turned 21 today.  My thoughts are a mess – I’m trying to comprehend where those years have gone but also celebrating Ariella’s life journey so far, from tiny infant to independent young woman.  I’ll share no more – except in the form of a few pictures from a meal Wendy and I just shared with Ariella and her best friend Ariel.

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The less exciting present

The more exciting present

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The present she really wanted

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The medal-winning bestie and the 21 year old

Update Four: Life on the smallholding

Friday, August 24th, 2012

I haven’t written much here lately so what follows is a rough visual timeline (one picture for every 2½ days) of some of the things we have been up to.

1. Standing outside the garage wondering about which little patch of chaos to tackle next.

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2. Joining the dog on the couch in the garage with a cup of tea, knowing the chaos can wait.

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3. Worrying that I’ll never mow the steep back garden without injuring myself.

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4. Spending a chilly early evening zeroing my new pest neutraliser.

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5. Collecting firewood, stacking firewood, chopping kindling and bagging kindling.

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6. Popping over to the neighbours for a few hours messing around in Jeeps.

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7. Fixing windows for the tenants.

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8. Buying SWMBO the nice shiny red sports car she’s always wanted.

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9. Flying to Sydney and back  in 24hrs for 1 sleep, 2 meals, 3 meetings, 6 taxi rides & an interrogation at Customs at 3 a.m.

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10. Learning from my mate Johnny how to dig post holes, widen a gateway and string No.8 wire.

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11. Chuckling at doing a little light gardening Kiwi-style i.e. with a big blue tractor.

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12. Wondering (repeatedly in this very rainy winter) if our access road will flood.

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13. Taking a family time out to help our eldest move out to a house with new friends.

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14. Collecting  and stacking more firewood, chopping and bagging more kindling.

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15. Working with my youngest to build a new, wider gate for the new, wider gateway.

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16. Sharing the satisfaction of a job well done – and a gate that fits!

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17. Remembering to go to the day job that (mostly) pays the bills.

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18. Admiring the decorating prowess of SWMBO (and assembling some furniture).

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19. Rescuing a sadly fatally traumatised birds from the woodburner flue. 

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20. Sampling a taste of the old country.

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21. Relishing a homemade egg and bacon muffin containing our first home laid egg.

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22. Assisting Johnny move his flood-bound flock to greener, drier pastures.

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23. Knocking myself out in the basement and bleeding a lot.

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24.  Making time with SWMBO to continue running our youth group – like when dissecting pigs’ eyes!

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25. Prepping the rentals for letting.

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26. Re-enacting ‘Fahrenheit 451′ with the kids’  old school work.

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27. Researching local history and finding that valley floods (No. 12) are par for the course.

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28. Retiring old power tools and buying their replacements.

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29. Buying a car – and then selling it again (long story).

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30. And revelling in the daily beauty of views, skies and rainbows (more of which soon).

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Update Three: The House

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012

We have flicked through the property papers and attended a good many realtor open homes over the last year or two and I was pretty much over the idea of ever finding a house and smallholding that would suit us as a family and that we could afford.

We looked at a place in a nearby township and I asked my friend Kevin, who is an architect, to give me his opinion. While he didn’t actually say ‘don’t buy’, it was clear he had reservations as he outlined the stuff he saw and the potential expenses we might incur.  He also gave me a piece of advice that he always bore in mind when buying a place; namely, you’re buying the vendor’s reason to sell and, if you don’t establish what that is, it can be an expensive mistake.

As we chatted outside the place, he told me we were setting our sights too low. By only looking at places we could afford and not considering other more expensive places we could haggle over and bargain down, we were unlikely to get anywhere close to the kind of place we were looking for.  This turned out to be sage and timely advice.

For a laugh, the next day we went and looked at a millionaire’s mansion with 10 acres and had a hoot imagining ourselves living there with the galleried bedrooms and the kidney shaped swimming pool; the power bill and pool maintenance costs would have seen us bankrupt within a few months.  Even so, I was tired of the whole house-hunting thing and, driving home, I had decided I’d had enough of looking.

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Two days later, SWMBO asked me to go view another property after work. It was the last thing I wanted to do but I begrudgingly agreed.  However, it turned out that the property was close by my friend Johnny’s farm and as we passed his place, turned onto an unmade road, through the gate and up a drive, I has a sense that this place might just be different.

And I was right, it was away from suburbia but close to the school bus route, was one bedroom short but had space to create another, had good land but not too much, was more rural but the commute was still realistic. Over the following weeks and months, we jumped through the usual and some not-so-usual hoops as we slowly but steadily worked our way towards making an offer we could afford and the vendor would accept. 

Built on the side of a hill at the end of a koru-shaped drive, the house overlooks a valley which leads to a small estuary on what is one of the largest harbours in the world.  We found the custom-built house cleverly thought out, well-designed and built with an eye for detail and a quality finish. You can imagine the goosebumps we got when the owner told us that the architect he had commissioned to design the place was our friend Kevin!

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The house is North facing with the rooms and decks laid out to make the best of the day’s sun.  The large roof catches the currently-plentiful rain and routes it into two 5,000 gallon tanks buried beneath the back garden for our water supply.  The windows give us amazing views of the surrounding farmland, fantastic skies and spectacular sunsets.   

Fanning away from the house are three paddocks: a narrow scrub-filled gulley dropping away to a small wetland area, a larger sloping grass paddock and a home paddock just below the house, where we keep our chickens and lamb. Across the drive, we have an acre of wetland reserve, a mini-ecosystem of native trees, plants and fauna bisected by a little brook. 

Halfway up the drive and opposite the wetland area, there is a small one bedroom rental cottage. Imagine our surprise when, on one of our visits, we discovered that we knew the folk renting it!  Sadly, they have moved to housesit for friends so we’re currently in the process of showing the place to a slow trickle of prospective tenants.

Adjacent to the main house is a self-contained one bedroom flat, which will provide space for visiting family and friends.  In between such visits, we will offer it as a home stay for international students or something similar to bring in a little extra income.  

Between the flat and the house is a large double garage or, should I say was, as we had a local builder convert part of the space into a bedsit for our first year uni student daughter, leaving the rest for a workshop and storage space. In fact, storage is one thing we’re not short of, as we’re blessed with two lofts, a wet room, a large basement, an under-deck store/animal shelter and a feed store in the back paddock.

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Update Two: The Animals

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

One of the attractions of moving to a smallholding is being able to keep animals. While we have no desire – and are far too lazy – to be self-sufficient, we are keen to build up our husbandry skills, get involved in the local farming community and know a bit more about the provenance of our meat & eggs.

Oddly enough, it was ‘Harriet’ the hedgehog who greeted us on our first morning on the smallholding.  When she wasn’t bustling her way around the back garden, she’d retire to the large, over-grown rosemary bush where, I suspect, she continues to live. 

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Meanwhile, we prepared to bring our first livestock home and, as SWMBO has wanted to keep chickens since forever, this entailed building up a chicken coop we bought online. After Maisie and I had completed that job, I fenced off a portion of the home paddock to provide an enclosed run for the much-mooted chickens.

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A week or so later, the local A&P (agricultural and pastoral) society’s showgrounds hosted the annual Auckland Poultry Show and we went along to have a look-see.  I have to say that I wasn’t aware that so many people were so passionate about breeding, raising and showing poultry and game birds and we were staggered by the variety of fowl on show.

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Beyond the showing cages, we found a sale room full of poultry for purchase and spent an hour or so wandering up and down the aisles, nodding sagely and trying to look like we knew what we were looking for.

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Though we had already made tentative arrangements to start with some chicks later in the spring, we were keen to do all we could to build up our bird husbandry skills and we left the show with three mature laying birds and a scrawny-looking Silkie rooster packed into the back of the car.

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Since then, the chooks have settled in well and starting to lay the occasional egg, with yesterday seeing the height of production thus far when Wendy returned from chook duties with three clutched in her hand.

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We are blessed to have our good friend Johnny and his family as neighbours.  Johnny has lived on his farm all his life and his willingness to share his knowledge and help us in a 101 way has blown us away.  Whether it has been a cooked meal on the day we moved in, the ‘permanent loan’ of a chainsaw or hours of hard labour to get a job done, Johnny and his family have never once been anything other than a blessing.

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A couple of weekends back, we climbed aboard a stock trailer behind Johnny’s farm bike (quad) and headed up to the top of his farm to watch him work with his two dogs.  Each day, he and the dogs split off the ewes with newborn lambs from the flock and move them to fresher pasture so as to provide richer feed for the lactating ewes.
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Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that I return home one evening to find, rather than the usual dog greeting me at the door, an orphaned lamb being fed in the kitchen. Poppy, as she has been named, was abandoned by her Mum (possibly as she was lame in one of her rear legs) and Johnny brought her over for us to bottle-feed and wean.
 
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Three weeks on, Poppy is doing great.  The lameness seems to have been caused by septic arthritis.  After refreshing my subcutaneous injection skills (acquired through legitimate purposes, I assure you), I gave her a shot of antibiotics and the leg has now improved to the point where the lamb is now skipping and gambolling about quite happily.  Johnny also helped me ring her tail to dock it and I got another chance to practice my hypodermic technique with a tetanus shot.
 
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Our existing pets (two cats who came with us from the UK seven years ago, a deaf white cat we were gifted and our Jack Russell/Maltese cross, Abbie) had little trouble adjusting to the smallholding.  For Abbie, the acres of space to explore, the masses of cow pasture mud to roll in and the new livestock to befriend are heaven-sent.  Like Abbie, Olive the deaf cat has become chums with the lamb, sees the smallholding as her very own safari park and has spent hours honing her skink-hunting prowess, dragging many a carcass into the house for proud inspection. As for the other two cats, if there’s a patch of sun on a couch or a recently vacated warm bed, that’s where you’ll find them.
 

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Update One: The Move

Monday, August 20th, 2012

After a five and a half month hiatus, here’s the first in a number of update posts that will hopefully go someway to explaining why blogging took a back seat for a while.

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The short story is this: we moved.  

The longer story is that, after 6 years, we have shifted from our first Kiwi home, a timber house on a quarter acre section on the edge of a township to our new place, a brick home with granny flat and separate cottage on 4 acres set in rural farmland.

First came the dreaded packing…

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…and more packing…

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..until it seemed like we’d never be finished with the never-ending boxes and brown tape.

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The big day arrived and with it heaps of friends to help us and the movers get our stuff shifted to the new place.  After a day of hard labour and laughs – not to mention a frustrating and expensive wait for keys – we managed to get everything from the old house to the new place, just in time for me to snap the last of the day disappearing over the coastal forest and into the Tasman.

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On being asked to dry dishes for the second time in an hour

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Like many I suspect, I used to wonder what ‘dying to yourself‘ meant when I heard it bandied about in books or conversations about Christian faith and living.  The following helped my understanding when I first read it – and still does.

“I was in San Francisco recently staying at this bed and breakfast place for people who are in the city to do ministry. It was a small house, but there were probably fifteen people living there at the time. The guy who ran the place, Bill, was always making meals or cleaning up after us, and I took note of his incredible patience and kindness. I noticed that not all of us did our dishes after a meal, and very few people thanked him for cooking. One morning, before anybody woke up, Bill and I were drinking coffee at the dining room table. I told him I lived with five guys and that it was very difficult for me because I liked my space and needed my privacy. I asked him how he kept such a good attitude all of the time with so many people abusing his kindness. Bill set down his coffee and looked me in the eye. “Don,” he said. “If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.”

—Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

The passage popped into my head again a short while ago as I headed to the kitchen to dry dishes for the second time in an hour. I hope and pray that I’ll become more like Bill and less like me as time goes on.