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Aug 13, 2022

 

It has been far too long, and the only excuse I can give is that life has been busy. With the start of the new school year and many life events, time has passed me by. Before returning to school, I decided to take the time to try my hand at making goat cheese! Bear with me for a moment as I walk you through the steps.

 

The first step is to spend time collecting your fresh goat milk. After securing a gallon of milk you have a sufficient amount to make a first round of cheese. Initially, you place the milk in a nonreactive pot – something made of stainless steel or porcelain. The reason for this is so that the environment in which the milk is heated is one that does not allow anything to seep in and spoil the taste. The milk has to be heated to exactly 86 degrees, and then you stir in the culture. After removing the pot from its heat source, a lid is placed upon it and it sits for 12 – 20 hours while you go about the daily tasks of life. Once that time has passed, you remove the lid and discover that the process of time has created curds and whey.

 

Using a stainless steel, slotted spoon you separate the curds from the whey and place them in butter cloth (aka cheese cloth) which you tie loosely and hang to dry. 12 hours later, after all of the remaining whey has dripped out, the cheese is placed in a bowl where a little salt is mixed in. That’s it! You then have enough cheese to make approximately 4 – 5 logs of delicious chevre. Which, as it turns out, is quite a bit like cream cheese. If you’re adventurous, you can flavor some of the logs with any number of seasonings and create delicacies such as dill dip, sweet and spicy cheese spread, Italian herb and garlic, the list goes on and on.

 

When asked how difficult it was to make, it occurred to me that there were very few steps that required me to actually do anything and lots of time spent waiting for the process to take its course. In short, it was all about walking out the wait time.

 

As you probably assume, this lesson in making goat cheese turned out to be a lesson in far more than cheese. We have reached a place in our journey that feels to me a lot like a plateau. Mind you, there are still many things we need to do in order to prepare for the day when God brings forth the young folks and we step into serving them here on the Drove, however daily chores and life events have brought us to a place where we are having to walk out the process and wait.

 

There are moments when waiting feels like nothing is happening. There are moments when it feels like perhaps somethings have seeped into the fiber of our lives that will spoil or at the very least delay the work. For example, we have been dealt a hand that involves a cancer diagnosis for Lee. In complete honesty, this caused us a handful of moments that initially took some wind out of our sails and rattled our spirits, but those moments were brief and fleeting. The Lord quickly reminded us that He is faithful and that when we are embarking on a journey that threatens the enemy, he tends to rise up with the intent to destroy our resolve and we find ourselves facing a giant.

 

We decided that Friday that our mantra for this season would be, “This ain’t the first giant God has slain, just the next one!” The following Sunday the sermon at church was entitled, “Whipping Giants”. We knew that God was reassuring us that He is always the victor. The following week, after dedicated prayer, we received the test results that told us there were no markers in the blood that indicated advanced cancer and nothing else showing on the CT scan. Stone thrown, giant down, now we cut off the head.

 

Surgery is scheduled for early September, due to the fact that all of this occurred during a job change which left us with an insurance gap in August. We know that is not by mistake but rather processing time. We firmly believe that during this time God is bringing about a complete healing that will glorify His name, and although we have scheduled surgery and are walking out the process, we believe the Great Physician will already have done the work when that time arrives.

 

All of this has been a lesson for me regarding the fact that sometimes we have to simply continue with our daily calls while God separates the curds and whey within our lives and hearts. We can even look at the life and ministry of Jesus and recognize that all things come about within God’s perfect timing and that often involves some waiting. For example, in chapter 2 of the book of Luke we see that at the age of 12 Jesus enters the temple and begins teaching. After which there is no additional teaching from Jesus until, according to Luke chapter 3, He is 30 years old. That is 18 years’ worth of processing time, and He was God in the flesh! We don’t know what occurred during those years, but we do know that 18 of them passed and passed with divine purpose. We can infer that during those years Jesus continued to go about the daily tasks at hand and that all the while God was at work in the process. Why then, would we think it would be any different for us?

 

As believers we are called to trust. We are called to walk in faith, and although we often see faith walking as only the times when we are taking on tasks and doing “the work” the reality is that faith walking often involves trusting in the process. In fact, we might even conclude that some of the greatest moments of faith are found in the spaces in which we can do nothing to make something happen. In other words, the times when we must hand life over to God, because there is nothing tangible that we can do to affect the situation. Those moments and seasons do not mean that nothing is taking place, or that we have delayed the work, or that we are out of step. What they do mean is that we are processing. We are being taught to recognize the Hand of God in every day events, the miraculous ones as well as the mundane moments.

 

For me, it has been a redirect toward realizing what it means to “Be still and know that [He] is God” (Psalms 46:10). So, rest assured, God is at work. He is faithful and sometimes He requires that we spend time within the process of time – or perhaps it’s better put that we spend time allowing God to walk us through the processing time. Either way, when we walk through those days, weeks, months, or maybe even years we should first look up and then look within.

 

Until next time, may God walk you through the delicate process of wait time.

~ Jen