Monday, December 31, 2012

We Love To Read

We are a family of readers and I love to read.

Jenna (a high school freshman at the time) and I had a contest a few years ago. We both wrote down our books read for the year and both of us clocked in at over 200 books for the year. She let me count books on tape or she would have won hands down.



There were a couple of years when my personal goals for the year were to read or listen to something north of 200 books per year. I decided this was a little excessive as it would at times take away from other things I wanted to do. (For example, this year I have been teaching some lessons through our Men's ministry at Autumn Ridge Church. I love to teach and I had not done this for a number of years.)

With respect to our family, it seems like the old adage that wisdom is better caught than taught has really been true at least with respect to reading. You will always find us with our attention captivated by a book. Even as high school and now college age students (when reading often wanes due to other time commitments) we still get stacks and stacks of books from the local library. Usually, the limit is what we can carry.

As a father, who cares a great deal about my children's interests and aspirations, I am very pleased that this is the case. To achieve this we have had to turn off the TV and video games. So while we are often ignorant of the latest sitcom, the richness of the topics around the table at meals reflects many books. At lunch yesterday, we discussed that "Gulliver's Travels" was a bit tedious on the introduction, but Swiss Family Robinson was not. We can thank our school's English and literature teachers for the reading of some of the classics.

Don't tell anyone, but the other students called me "Book Worm" when I was in high school. It wasn't always used in the most complementary way, because some of the naysayers were not very good students. But I guess I really didn't care because I always thought that reading was a key to success as a student and a person. I think the late Zig Ziglar captured the thought well when he said, "If you don't read, you can't lead".

 So what does this have to do with farming? You will speed the process of working through the very steep learning curve with respect to organic farming if you will read, read, and read some more. I explore the world of reading on a wide variety of topics. From my journal this year I count 75 books read.

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