Entertaining Angels

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. —Hebrews 13:2

But, you know, sometimes those who entertain strangers are the angels.

We had the unique (to us; though I'm sure it's common for them) pleasure of being guests in the home of the Ken Carpenter Family outside Nashville over the weekend. We're not strangers, but we were last month before the Generations conference. (I did have the pleasure of briefly meeting Ken and his lovely family at the 2005 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival where my boss was a judge, and Ken won the Jubilee Award for best documentary for "A Journey Home.")

What made the visit unique for us, as I told the Carpenters, is that this was the BEST vacation we've ever had! We were greeted with the utmost in hospitality: delicious food, comfortable beds and rooms, great conversation, delightful children (including ours, there were a dozen) and warm Christian charity, love and camaraderie. This family knows how to have fun together and it shows!

Mrs. C, preparing the family meal	Mr. C, preparing the family meal table
Carpenter and Howard clans together again

We also got to enjoy the fellowship of our friend, Peter Serven, handsome and talented webmaster for The Serven Clan; and our new friends, Graham and Joel Fisher, who won the 2004 "Best of Festival" Jubilee Award at the SAICFF for their delightful 14-minute short, "The Art of Play."

Peter, REALLY up close and personal!

Heartthrobs of the two-year-old set,
Joel and Graham (or is it Graham and Joel?) Fisher

How encouraging to have my sons see how godly young men conduct themselves, preparing themselves to be husbands and fathers! Peter, Joel and Graham, you're each an inspiration to me!

[Scrapbook] Like Arrows in the Hands of a Warrior...

Psalm 127:3-4
A Song of Ascents.

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
         The fruit of the womb is a reward.

Boys protect girls!

A righteous man regards his animals

4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
         So are the children of one's youth.

Sweet Little Mama

Joyful maiden

5 Happy is the man...

I shall call her... Femi-Me

...who has his quiver full of them.

Psalm 128:1-3
A Song of Ascents.

1 Blessed is every one who fears the LORD,
         Who walks in His ways.
2 When you eat the labor of your hands,
         You shall be happy, and it shall be well with you.
3 Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine
         In the very heart of your house,

Many daughters have done well, but you excel them all.

         Your children like olive plants
         All around your table.

"Gimme that camera!"

"Da- Da- DA!"

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Posted by Jim Bob Howard to Scrapbook at 6/06/2006 04:34:00 AM

...And Then There Were None (Killing Time, Part 2)

So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood." — Genesis 9:1-4

The world around us calls animals people, insisting that they have "rights." It then calls people animals, without purpose, accidental parasites on the planet. But God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." (Gen. 1:26) The United States Constitution affirms "that all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." In fact, it was right after God gave Noah permission to have a cook-out (see Gen. 9:1-4 above) that He established the authority of "the State."

From the hand of every man's brother I will require the life of man.

Whoever sheds man's blood,
By man his blood shall be shed;
For in the image of God
He made man."

It is precisely because He created man in His image that we have the "unalienable Right" to life! But the beasts of the field, not so...

Warning: Following the wisdom of Herrick Kimball, I'll tell you that the following story is not for the squeamish and/or sissified (though it's written by someone who mostly fits that description). If you want the basic story without graphic descriptions, just read the captions.

As planned, I show up with the boys to help "process" chickens at the house of my friend, the Chicken Farmer.

process /prä'-ses/ v.t. to turn live chickens into dinners.
SYN. butcher or slaughter poultry (ex. chickens)

To be...

The boys and I arrive around 11:15 and find Farmer at the killing shed (a VERY old log building), with all the macabre apparatus assembled to do the deed: killing cones, a cleaver, a gutting knife, pots of scalding water, a trash bag for feathers, heads and feet, and one for the carcasses. Oh! and a hose, poised ready to clean dirt and dropping off the chickens, and blood off of everything else.

Farmer hasn't always had chickens... in fact this is his first flock of meat birds. And the only processing he's done before today was a reaction to an aggressive rooster. Rooster, it seems, was chasing the children and otherwise hastening his arrival at the dinner table. So Farmer called a fellow-agrarian adept in the processing arts and in true med school fashion, Farmer got to "watch one, do one, teach one." And the first one he did on his own was Chicken #1 today.

Apparently these particular chickens are eight-weekers and should be processed when they're eight weeks old. Though God's plans are never thwarted, things don't always go according to our plans: Other priorities prevented Farmer from processing these birds at the 8-week mark. During week ten, the temperatures heated up and he lost more birds than we currently have in the line up. The survivors (who soon won't be) are now ten weeks old, and a couple of them aren't looking like they've got much fight left.

"You ready?" asked Farmer.

"Sure," I said, hoping I sounded convincing.

Head-first into the cone goes Chicken #1.

[Note: Here comes the descriptive part... to squeamish, sissified suburban folks, click here] to skip it.

Still with me? Good... to read the graphic parts, you'll have to highlight all of the following...

Click here -->As he's putting Chicken #1 into the cone, Farmer asks me to hold the feet.

"Now, she doesn't want to be in here, especially once I slit her throat, so you'll have to be ready to hold her in."

"OK." I say, more resolutely than I feel.

Then, as Herrick describes, sure enough, Farmer pulls the Chicken's head down and cuts through the artery. The object is to keep the brain connected to the nervous system so it will continue to tell the heart to keep pumping blood to that artery which will now spill it on the ground. Meanwhile, Chicken is squawking only a little bit... apparently from the initial pain of the cut, but then only as she tries to fight her way out of the cone.

When it looks like she's finally done bleeding out and appears to be dead, my job is to pull her out of the cone and chop her head off with a cleaver. (No, Herrick, I didn't do it the manly way and pull the heads off with my bare hands.) Sometimes, Chicken isn't quite done dying and begins flapping furiously, making me hold on more securely. If I put her down, she'd be running around "like a chicken with her head cut off"—literally.

Still holding Chicken's feet, I dip her in scalding water—about 160-170°F—for about 30-40 seconds, which loosens the feathers. I then tie her feet to a rope and begin plucking all the feathers on her legs and breast—we've decided to process them down to only breasts and leg quarters.

Once the feathers are removed, I take the cleaver again and chop the legs off at the end of the drumstick, and then give the bird to Farmer who cuts through the skin and removes the breast "filets" and cuts off the leq quarters. A thorough rinse and that bird goes into a plastic zipper bag and into the fridge. The rest of the carcass is discarded into a separate trash bag. We put the bags in the fridge for three days and then the meat is eaten or frozen.

The first two take about an hour, but then we start to get into a groove.<-- and drag to here.



Ten hours later we finally bag the last one.

...or not to be...

There is no question - homegrown chicken is the best!

[Beards] Procrastinated Pogonotrophic Progress Post

I suppose it was inevitable. Thinking back on it, I can see with 20/20 hindsight that it was a bad idea. I mean how much can one actually say about beards? Enough for an entire topic devoted to it? Not so much. My last entry in this category was in late 2004. Sheesh!

This will probably be my last post in this category, so I thought you might like to see (maybe you couldn't care less, but then... would you still be reading, if that were the case?) some pictures in the progression.

Speaking of procrastination, we have been slackers in the Getting Film Developed Department. We have a bag of rolls that need to be developed and every once in awhile, we'll grab a couple to throw in with a new roll we're developing. Today was one of those days.

Our little church community recently celebrated the baptism of a covenant child by enjoying a feast hosted by the baby's parents. There was food and drink and dancing and food and music and food and touch football and tire-swinging and food and laughter and conversation and food and dancing and joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart. WHERE?! Down in m-- uh... sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah, the feast! And we got some great pictures of parents and children and babies and grandparents dancing. (Watch Every Thought Captive for the highlights.) Today we ran those two rolls to get developed and grabbed a couple from the bag to go with them.

One of the rolls was from Christmas 2002! We only had two children then, and ds#2 (now age 6) was wearing the pajamas that dd#1 (age 2) is wearing tonight. Ds#2 had curly hair back then (it didn't come back as curly after his first "real" haircut, around his third birthday). The other roll was from about the time of my last "Beard" blog entry.

So, here are a couple of pictures of the early stages of my beard:

Homeschool Dad's Breakfast - October, 2004

(BTW, the gentleman to my left in this pic, is my friend Wade Myers, one of the speakers at Vision Forum's Entrepreneurial Bootcamp. Wade is worth the price of admission!)

Feasting with our good friends after visiting Saint Peter

Celebrating the news that dd#1 was going to be a big sister

All of the above are during the VERY early stages of my beardedness. For a current view, this was recently posted by our friends, the Serven Clan, on their blog:

Enrapt in coversation with the Serven "children" — the four oldest are adults!

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Posted by Jim Bob Howard to Beards at 6/02/2006 10:49:00 PM

Killing Time

When we moved to Abingdon, it was a step toward "the country." Abingdon itself is pretty rural compared to our upbringing in the suburbs of Dallas and then subsequent life in the suburbs of Austin. (Heck, Bristol was rural compared to those places!) We're on a whopping three-quarter acres of hillside, but we're hoping to make the best of it. We've planted a garden with several lettuce types, carrots (not doing so well in this rocky soil), peas, corn, potatoes and pumpkin. We're running late, but still hope to get some green beans and squash in around the corn in the "three sisters" method. We also have blueberry and cherry bushes, and two cherry trees. We won't get blueberries until year three, but we're hoping for cherries this year.

I never had "farm" animals growing up; only a plethora of furry house-pets: cats, a dog or two, and a rabbit once. But since we moved here, I've wanted to get some animals, starting with something small like chickens, then moving "up" to goats, pigs, and cows, etc. Even though my boss is famous in our circles for being the World's Worst Chicken Farmer, several other folks in our community have made a pretty good go of it. One friend, in fact, has begun selling us his farm-fresh free-ish-range eggs. They're delicious!

I mentioned in my last post that we have been reading Herrick Kimball's excellent book, Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian. We've really been enjoying Mr. Kimball's delightful delivery of his exploits into a simple, separate and deliberate life of agrarianism. Though reading, you're first response might be, "It can't always be all that he cracks it up to be," you still come away with a sense that, "Yeah, in most ways, I think he's on to something." Until...

Chapter 17 has the ominous title, "Pulling Chicken Heads Off." Mr. Kimball, assuming you didn't read the chapter title very well, graciously includes a warning here:

WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions that may appall and offend some non-agrarian readers.

After reading "graphic descriptions" of Killing, Scalding, Plucking, Head Removing and Gutting, I realized even more clearly how non-agrarian (read: "squeamish, sissified suburban boy") I am. But, still, this is the direction I believe God would have us move, so I'm willing to take on graphic descriptions and take them captive to the obedience of Christ.

Now, though, we're really going to get the opportunity to get our hands dirty... literally!

I spoke with our egg supplier yesterday and he was lamenting the fact that heat had claimed 10 of his birds, and that we wasn't able to take off work to "process" them. "Need some help?" I offered. "Oh, man... we were just talking last night about how we were going to need some help processing them and were wondering who we could ask. That would be great!"

So, this Saturday, the Howards are going to his house to help process their chickens. It'll be a great day of taking dominion over the earth—and getting disgustingly messy. What more could a boy ask for? :)

Stay tuned... I expect to have my own "Pulling Chicken Heads Off" chapter very soon!

[Reading] Book: Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian

Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian by Herrick Kimball
Whizbang Books, 2006

I know you've heard of this book from others, but then maybe you haven't. This is a great book!

I recently brought this delightful treasure home and then it quickly disappeared as Amy began savoring it, little by little. I managed to get some time to read more today. I'm only on the fourth chapter (Amy's way further along and regularly whets my appetite with, "Wait 'til you get the part where he talks about...!") and I just had to share one of these little nuggets of truth that many of us miss unless we're paying attention. And even then, we might still miss it because we're Moderns:

Moderns can't help but do the math: two hours of work to prepare five packages of frozen strawberries... "Wow! Those are some expensive berries you got there! Don't you agrarians realize it's cheaper and easier to just go buy frozen fruit at the supermarket?"

That is the natural conclusion of people who live their lives believing that money is the only—or, at least, the most important—standard of value.

Agrarians, on the other hand, see this sort of thing very differently. We see value in the doing of planting, tending, harvesting, processing, and putting up our own food. We see value in knowing where our food comes from. We see value in the assurance that this food is pure and safe. We see value in the incredibly superior flavor of homegrown and fresh-picked food. We see value in the satisfaction that comes with being able to take care of our own food needs and not being dependent on the industrial providers, even if it is just in part. This is freedom. This is part of what makes The Good Life good.

Preach it, Brother! Pick up this book and read Mr. Kimball's blog. He has some great things to say. We need to hear it!

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Posted by Jim Bob Howard to Reading at 5/26/2006 08:04:00 PM

[Thoughts] Pre-, Inter-, and Post-Conference Hobnobbing

Well, another Highlands Study Center conference is behind us. I received lots of positive feedback. The title of the conference was Generations: Giving Honor to Whom Honor is Due. The speakers were top-notch and delivered powerful lectures to our crowd of over 700 people (in less than 200 families, mind you).

One of the wonderful aspects of my job is that I get to interact with godly men and families who are impacting the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. Of course, working for R. C. Sproul Jr. is a joy and a privilege. He is a wonderful father, a devoted husband, a caring friend and shining example of Christ's grace to men. His father, R. C. Sproul—whom I've listened to and read for years, I've had the privilege of meeting only once before, after a long trip to RCJR's house. We didn't converse much on that occasion, but this one was different. He is a gracious, godly man, who loves his son and his grandchildren with abandon. (He also loves the Steelers, but I'm willing to overlook that—indeed, it's a Sproul family trait!) Doug Phillips, founder of Vision Forum, is a man among men. How wonderful it was to have Beall and all the children with him this time! And Doug's father, Howard Phillips, is a powerhouse who understands the major challenges of our day!

Rowan and I arrived at the airport Thursday in time to see the younger Phillips family, along with Peter Bradrick, Doug's personal assistant, and Nathaniel Darnell, Vision Forum's new "video guy," exit the plane—they had half the seats on the plane. We loaded up the 15-passenger van—with Nathaniel and all of their luggage; everyone else rode in two other rental cars! ;)

After depositing them all at the hotel and making sure they found a place to have dinner, Rowan and I headed home for a quick dinner ourselves. Later that evening, I had the pleasure of a "being a fly on the wall" during a conversation between all four of our speakers on the topic of "Reformation and Revolution." It will be our next Basement Tape that will soon go out to all of our monthly supporters, who, like me, will also get to be a "fly on the wall."

In the conversation after the conversation, Doug asked RCJR to share some of his memories of great and godly men who had shared the family meal table with them when he was growing up. The ensuing conversation revealed a common thread between these two families in the way they had families meals. Both of the "second generation" families continue the tradition of a father teaching his children at the family meal table, with differences of style and content, of course. Stay tuned for a post in the near future regarding the family meal table...

Talking with RC Sr. and Howard was a treat. Both are gracious, humble men, and I count it a privilege to know them. I had a chance to talk with Howard during lunch on Saturday about the work my friend, Robert, and I had done founding the Constitution Party of Williamson County while we were still in Texas. When I asked what we could do locally to get a party going, he recruited me to run for office... almost. ;) Lunch took longer than expected, and Howard offered to skip his lunch and head back to the conference in order to keep us on track. As we continued to wait, I took him up on his offer, wrapping his meal up to go when it came. He ate it (cold) between the next two breaks with no complaint. I'm deeply grateful for his sacrifice for the sake of our conferees. (He also gave me some catering advice that I'll use next year!)

Another meal, after the conference, at the Sprouls' Jr. home was another delight. A delicious dinner cooked by Matt Clement (a local favorite chef!) and extraordinary hospitality by the Williams family of Kennesaw, GA, set the stage for engaging conversation and warm fellowship with the Phillips and Sproul families. While Rowan was playing outside with the Sproul and Phillips children, Amy and I had the pleasure of relaxed conversation at our table with Doug & Beall, Howard, Laurence & Angela, and Dakota & Samantha. The family meal table came up again here and the ensuing discussion helped Amy and me solidify some plans of our own to change the way we do things.

Later, we all roared at the banter and antics of RC Sr. and Howard as they "one-upped" one another naming Boston Braves players (the Braves left Boston after the 1952 season!). These two made quick friends and we all laughed at their stories from days gone by.

One of the highlights of the conference was the beautiful singing of Genevan Foundation, made up of the three oldest Serven children and our own Jonathon Landell (who also played piano and was our roving photographer). This talented quartet led us all in a Psalm Sing Saturday morning, with a beautiful rendition of Psalm 98.

We were touched by a request after worship on Sunday. Mrs. Serven approached me and said her children had discussed it and they wanted to get to know us better, but only had two small hotel rooms to offer as a place to fellowship. So, the sixteen of us spread out at one long table at Cracker Barrel and had a wonderful time! After that, we welcomed them into our somewhat messy (from a week of conference preparation) home. What a joy they were! Our only regret is that Marcus (the patriarch of the clan) was unable to be with them. However, a great treat, especially for Rowan, was when Rebecca, Nathan and Elizabeth let him join in as tenor on singing "Genevan Song," which was featured on the SAICFF 2005 Jubilee Award-winning documentary, "A Journey Home," directed/produced by Ken Carpenter at Franklin Springs Family Media. Rowan just beamed! Thanks, guys!

Speaking of the Carpenters... Amy had the pleasure of getting to know Ken and his lovely wife, Devon, at the Franklin Springs booth during the conference. During their conversation, they worked out to spend some time with us on Monday before they headed home. We met them at Java J's for coffees and danishes and pleasant conversation, while the children enjoyed the board games provided. Then it was back to our house for lunch. Again, a delightful visit was had by all!

This is a conference our family will never forget! And we can't wait to see all of our new friends again.

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Posted by Jim Bob Howard to Thoughts at 5/10/2006 01:41:00 PM