The Why of Homesteading

It has taken a long time for us to call ourselves ‘homesteaders’.  The term today seems to carry with it images of people in covered wagons, old men living in the hills, or people who are expert gardeners or that seem to always have all the right knowledge and all the right equipment.

There are many homesteading blogs, and many companies selling homesteading supplies and books these days.  The back-to-the-land movement has been around since roman times, and we see it really surging again today in modern times.  People choose to live closely to the land for many reasons.  Some wish to shelter themselves from financial and economic woes.  Some seek to live quietly, and choose the homesteading life for the solitude.  Some choose it to shelter themselves and their children from the modern world and its toxic culture.  While all of those may be valid arguments for the agrarian lifestyle, we have a slightly different point of view.

Simply put, we believe that living in close relationship with the land is what God originally intended for mankind.  It isn’t hard to arrive at this conclusion.  One only has to look at the story of creation.  Before the fall of man, God built a garden and put man in it.  Man’s job was to work and take care of the garden. You can see why there is a great desire in people to be connected to the source of their food and why people have an innate fascination with nature, its processes and its beauty, because before anything else, God established man in a relationship with himself and the land.

We know that the ideal situation was short lived.  Eventually man rebelled against god by disobeying him, and thus the relationship was violated, and broken.  What was lost was not only paradise, but the relationship itself.  That is why Jesus came; to restore that relationship.

We see homesteading as fulfilling man’s original mandate, to work the garden.  If we lose track of where we came from, it is extremely difficult to understand where we are going.  For many Christians today, Jesus came solely to save us from our sins.  That is true, but to what end?  The truth is, Christ’s death and resurrection did make atonement for our sins, but the whole point of the redemption was to restore what was lost.  Man’s relationship with God.  In a very real way, when Jesus conquered death, he opened the door back to Eden.

This is a very big thought, and sometimes it is hard to connect scooping chicken poop with God’s grand purpose for man.  But it is the truth that is constantly before us and it is what drives us back to the land.  We were created for this relationship with God and his creation.  And we have found nothing else in the world that compares with the satisfaction of working the land, and nurturing things to grow.  It does give us pause though, when we think of farming, and gardening and homesteading in these terms, because when we think about our relationship with the land as a divine calling and not just an occupational decision, it really causes us to examine our practices.  If our relationship with the land is reflective of our relationship with God…you do the math.

We are not experts.  We do not have high degrees, or a hundred years of experience.  In fact, we aren’t really even very good homesteaders.  Sometimes, though, the destination is not some high and lofty goal but is actually the journey itself.  Sometimes the process of doing is more important than what is to be done.