Rehoboth Farm

After helping Mr. Kendrick bale hay on the 14 acres near his house he asked if we were available in a couple of weeks to do some more, and we said sure. We got his call soon after and headed back to Pleasant Valley. He explained that the field we would be working in that day was down the road a piece on another tract of land that he owned which was a little bigger than the one before. We followed him a couple of miles to the base of the mountain where the scenery opens up into a beautiful valley of green pastures, lined with white fences that seem to go on forever. On one side of the road he owns a hay field about 120 acres in size, bordered by a lake and several small ponds. He had already cut the field on one side, and the greenish-brown carpet of hay stretched out for over a half a mile.

I have spent the last 22 years working in a florescent-lit office building, staring into a computer screen. Reality becomes whatever you are used to, and reality for me had become what most people believe it to be; the selling of intangeble objects and services and the accumulation of wealth, in order to buy things that you don’t really need, on credit. Not to quote secular music, but there was a song that said, ‘...and it’s true we are immune, when fact is fiction and TV a reality’. It took years of having the Lord convict us, (mainly through having children and seeing the world through their eyes), that what we consider reality is anything but. If anyone wants to understand the lunacy of the work-day world, then spend one day on a tractor, in a field, under an immense blue sky, watching shadows of clouds move slowly along the ground while immersed in the sweet smell of freshly cut hay. It never ceases to amaze me that Mr. Kendrick actually makes a living at this, along with his heard of Angus cows.

This is all he has ever done, just as his father before him. Sometimes he will ask me questions about the business world and my answers will usually leave him with a puzzled look on his face. I have decided that this is a good thing. People shouldnÂ’t have to understand things that have no relevance to GodÂ’s kingdom. Our first few times baling hay were carefully coordinated around my schedule at work. Unfortunatley this left Mr. Kendrick going it alone sometimes because his schedule is determined by such high-tech variables as the sun, wind and rain. At some point I decided that I needed the reality of hay baling more than the un-reality of the workplace and so I began to help whenever necessary and I would use vacation days, paid-days-off, whatever.

There are a lot of comparisons between the work-place and home-schooling. Public school is an institution that takes creative individuals and sequesters them all day long in a building, doing mundane work, in an effort to create a workforce for corporations. Those corporations then take them and sequester them all day long in a building, doing mundane work, for the rest of their lives. Of course unlike schools, corporations keep people employed with the understanding that if they work long enough and hard enough, that one day they can manage more and more of the mundane workforce.

When I used to ride to elementary school I would notice all of the activity going on around me, unrelated to school. Men coming and going in trucks; store owners opening their businesses for the day; firemen standing out in front of the station, a whole world that existed outside of the classroom. In the classrooms there were huge windows all along one wall, but the venetian blinds were always kept tightly closed. The teachers said it was because we would spend all of our time looking out the window and not paying attention. Looking back I can see that not only was that true, but also very understandable as well. The best desk in a classroom was by a window, and sometimes you could sneak your pencil between the blinds and watch the world go by.

Watching an interesting sight from a window was a far more educational experience than anything going on in the classroom, yet there I would sit, hour after hour, day after day, and for what? To take 6 months to learn how to do addition and subtraction when my mother could have taught me at home in a week. To take a year studying how to breakdown a sentence into a subject and a predicate, identifying nouns and pronouns and a hundred things that have absolutely no relevance outside of a classroom, ever. The same goes for the workplace. I sit hour after hour, day after day, helping banks figure out how to reach into a consumers pocket and take their last dime without them noticing it, while all the time they smile and say, ‘the customer is our top priority’. You bet they are, there’s one born every minute.

The bottom line is that the classroom has become just another form of daycare, so that both parents can serve a corporate master without the burden of childcare. The workplace is servitude, the more you work the more money you make and the more money you make, the more debt you accumulate. The more debt you accumulate, the more you need your job, and so the more you work, and so on. Debt and the credit industry drive our economy. Personal debt has grown so large that credit institutions are scrambling for ways to tap the last sources of cash in the American familyÂ’s budget, and to insure that they maintain a steady stream of new business, the top market for new credit today is the 18-year-old.

A few years ago I sat in a meeting with executives from a national furniture store chain that had been in business for decades. We ran their credit accounts and they had asked us to come and help them figure out how to squeeze more money out of their existing customers and how to find new ones as well. During the course of the conversation one of the execs stated that they were considering changing the ‘front room sales model’. I asked what he meant. He said, "Furniture; that’s what draws people into the store, but the real sale is in convincing that customer to finance his purchase, whether it’s $100 or 10,000". "We don’t sell furniture, we sell credit". "Furniture has become a losing proposition, but credit never is".

I could see the founder of the company turning over in his grave. No doubt he saw furniture as an art-form, and now decades later it had become a prop, a convertible commodity whose only purpose was to lure customers into the store like a carnival barker, with the real purpose of turning a sale into new debt. I was dumbfounded, I was about to comment on the fact that they would have to change the name of the store, after all you can’t call yourself XYZ Furniture if your showroom is full of vacuum cleaners. Think about how many times are you about to pay for something in cash when the sales clerk says ‘Would you like to put this on your ABC credit card?’ Or, If you apply for a Mega-mart card today you can get 10% off on your purchase! Yes, and pay 25% in interest on it for the next 3 years while you try and pay it off.

These experiences are the type of things that have convinced me that there is a world that exists outside of the classroom and outside of the workplace; in other words; the real world. To me there are three alternatives; homesteading, or entrepreneurialism, or a combination of both. Homestead, to me, means grow your own food, raise your own animals, teach your own children and leave me alone to enjoy GodÂ’s creation. ThereÂ’s a lot to be said for this type of lifestyle, unfortunately you can never fully escape from society, or especially, the government.

Then there's entrepreneurialism, and by this I mean serving others (not a corporation) and supporting your family at the same time. This is freedom in its truest sense, the freedom to create and sell things, to make your own hours and set your own prices. You have the freedom to include your family in your business and use it to keep them from wanting to leave home and go elsewhere to find happiness. ItÂ’s also the freedom to use a business as a way to minister to others, about things of the Lord and about the traps of a corporation lifestyle.  Our goal is to always have some type of agricultural enterprise going on, and we know many others who feel the same way.  This is why stopping things like NAIS is so important.

Mr. Kendrick is an entreprenuer, he makes and sells cows and hay. Whether he knows it or not he sets an example for others who find themselves owing their soul to the company store. There is a life that exists outside of the conference room and the cubicle, sometimes it just takes walking over to the window and peeking through the blinds to see it.