Cultivate Conference

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Eastward Missions

Families in Agriculture

Edwin Dysinger

Jennifer Dysinger

Communing with God in the Garden

All right, I'm Ed Dysinger, and this is my sweetheart Jennifer.

And we're from near Nashville, Tennessee, where my dad was born and raised.

We are, we're just really, really happy to be here with you.

And we've been looking forward to this, haven't we?

I'm especially happy to be here in Australia because As you heard John say, that's where our mom's from.

Her dad was born in Perth and her mother grew up in Currumbong area.

My grandmother, my mom's mother, was the daughter of John Pocock who was taken on as a maintenance man for Ellen White at Sunnyside.

And that was when he lost his job because he started keeping the Sabbath.

And she reached out to him and asked him to come.

And it was really kind of exciting to, yes, on Sunday we visited Sunnyside and there was a desk of Ellen White's and a chair of Ellen White's that she gave to John Pocock when she left and then the family had given it to Sunnyside.

I didn't realize that until we went there.

So, I have been to Australia once before in 1981.

I came with my mom and John and I have a brother in between us, Wayne.

He's been back here quite a few times since then.

He's a doctor and he's been involved with sanitarium in Chip.

We had 2 weeks and we got a bus pass and we went from Sydney down to Melbourne, out to Adelaide, out to Perth, back across again to Port Macquarie, to Brisbane, to Townsend, and back.

So, if you can imagine that in 2 weeks on a bus.

We spent half the nights on the bus and the other half in the homes of relatives.

I'm married and life hasn't got much slower since.

1 thing that was special about that trip, I had a certain young lady on my mind the whole time.

And when I got home, things progressed, and that was us.

This topic is so special to us, about God's purpose, His glorious purpose for education for the human race.

Our loving Father, you are so tender and so gracious toward us.

You have led us every day of our lives and brought us to this place and revealed yourself and your love to us.

We pray today that we may get a glimpse of your glory, that we may reflect that glory and give you praise and honor.

May we love 1 another, we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Our journey, we're just going to share a little bit of how we were schooled.

Okay, so I was, my parents were missionaries and they were missionaries to India, so my first memories of India And America was an elusive land that people had walkie-talkie dolls or, you know, we saw missionaries bring things and I thought, what is that land?

And when I was 7 and a half, I returned to America, and it was there that I was put into public schools.

I was kind of, I wasn't an Adventist, and my parents really believed in the American ideal of educating everybody the same, that We shouldn't have classes or elite ways of being raised.

And they had quite an attitude of humility about life, even though they were both doctors.

My dad came from poverty and worked hard to become a physician and to serve.

So I was a little fearful of this world that I was coming into because it was so different than what I was experiencing under the mango trees.

And it was growing up in that, that I was very obedient, always doing what I was told in school.

I was a favorite of the teachers because I was listening and I was learning.

But what I was learning was men's thoughts, right?

And God isn't a part of the secular public school system.

And therefore you're with your peers and That isn't really conducive to family life and relationships.

And even though I didn't recognize the need as I grew and as I got older and you get heartaches in life, I started feeling the needs of my soul, which you don't so much when you're a little child.

And fortunately, and even before that, honey, my greatest thing that turned my life on with a light was growing a garden with some neighbors.

They had an orange grove as a business, lots of orange groves.

We lived in Southern California near Loma Linda.

So it was in that setting with these neighbors that I grew the first garden and it was so engaging to me to see a seed grow into food that I could eat.

It was the most practical thing I felt I'd ever done, except, you know, I weeded and did things at home when other kids were playing.

And life had more meaning in the garden to me.

And fortunately, when I was 15 or 16, my dad took a sabbatical to New Zealand.

And he took all of us with him, and we spent a year there.

But at that time, a girl took an interest in me and took me to Navigators, and I was praying about whether the Bible was real.

You know, that might seem funny for a missionary child, but my parents really didn't have morning and evening worship, so they didn't have the foundations that we have.

And So I was looking for a holistic view of life.

And the Bible just, the Lord confirmed to me the Bible is real.

And that began my journey with the Lord, my own personal journey with the Lord.

So, when I was in grade school, I hated school.

And so I just did the minimum necessary to get by.

The main issue I had with school was that I didn't see that it had any relevance to real life.

I felt like it was confining and trying to put me into a mold and I felt that it prevented me because it gave me lots of busy work, that it was preventing me from following and pursuing my real interests.

In high school, I attended an academy that was a boarding school that had a work study program.

And that started to get a little bit better.

And among a number of different work positions that I had there, I was assigned to work in the dairy for a while, and I really loved that, the discipline and the hard labor.

I also read the book Education during that time, and I was really attracted to the holistic picture that I saw in that book.

I felt like, wow, there really is a better way, and I felt like my views on school were somewhat validated by that book.

By the way, how many of you have read Education?

I want to really encourage those of you who haven't to read it.

It's actually, I mean I like so many books that Ellen White has written, but I have to say this is right at the top among the ones that I like.

Honey, I was going to add that when I actually became a converted Christian, school started having very little meaning to me because I'd been producing really good grades, top of my class, but it wasn't real.

It didn't impact real life and so that changed my life and what was really exciting is when God brought me into this message, and everything took a holistic viewpoint on life.

So when we got married, it was our intention to be missionaries.

We wanted to go overseas, and we wanted to have a family.

And we wanted to do something different with our family than how we had been raised.

Caden is the oldest, then Patrick, then Alistair, and Riona.

And they live on the farm next to us, and it's such a pleasure to have them there.

Cheyenne is a graphic artist and he's able to do most of his work from home.

Our next is Caroline and her husband David and they have 2 children, Sarah here And Peter.

And David was an apprentice on our farm and met Caroline that way.

Pamela Dysinger

True Education and the Agrarian Life

Father in heaven, I want to thank you so much for the opportunity that we have to look at some practical applications of education.

And I pray that you would just be here, that you would anoint my words and give me the words to say in Jesus' name, amen.

I'm actually very glad to see that this is a small group.

Because We're here for an agriculture conference.

And education is just simply a natural byproduct of agriculture.

But I'm glad to see that people are focusing on agriculture.

But I'm here to focus on the agrarian life and what, I would say what I have seen firsthand, the applications.

And I wished that I could have seen it all in reverse.

You know, if we could have just seen to go back.

I'm a teacher by training, and so I came at the homeschool model very much as I was taught to teach.

And God had other things he wanted to teach me because he made my time and ability so limited to teach in the way that I would have naturally done it that he forced on me true education, if you can say that.

It was sort of forced on me and I resisted it for many years and kept feeling like I was robbing and depriving my kids, but time tells the real truth, and the real truth is that an agrarian life gives the best and the most balanced and the most whole education that I believe 1 can have.

I have a story I want to share with you from this marvelous book called Councils on Agriculture.

I wish that this story had been available to me years ago, but I think it has particular interest to you because it happened on this very soil in Australia.

It's about a brother Colston, and I might be pronouncing his name wrong.

I meant to ask somebody first, how would you pronounce this?

White was actually here and her son Willie, William, was with her.

White saw Brother Colston, a new convert in Australia.

He saw his necessities and borrowed 8 pounds from our blacksmith and loaned it to him that he might make a beginning.

Willie White goes to the blacksmith to borrow 8 pounds to give to brother Colston so he can have a new beginning.

And all are glad and more than astonished to see the beginning he has made.

About 12 acres have been cleared and planted with sweet potatoes and field corn.

The sweet corn they will eat, and the field corn they will sell.

The vegetables that have been grown help a great deal in supporting the family.

The little lads are working with their father like little farmers.

They are so earnest and full of zeal that it is amusing to look at them and see how happy they are in their work.

They have not so much society because of their own families, because of their own family connections, but they are in the very best school they could be in.

These little lads with their dads, they're so full of Zul that it's amusing to look at them.

It goes on to say, we feel thankful to God for what we see and we shall encourage those who come into the truth to take up land which they can cultivate and so sustain themselves.

Wow, if I could have been encouraged with those words 20 years ago, I wouldn't have tried so, I wouldn't have resisted so much the agricultural life.

But you have to start where you're at, and isn't that wonderful that God takes us from right from where we are?

The garden places you and your children where you are surrounded by God's creation.

I have to work 2 of these things I guess here.

Education means more than the mere study of books.

It is necessary that both the physical and mental powers be exercised in order to have a proper education.

You'd think they would make it intuitive to delete that when you put a quote in.

When in counsel with the Father, before the world was, it was designed that the Lord God should plant a garden for Adam and Eve in Eden and give them the task of caring for the fruit trees and cultivating and training the vegetation.

Useful labor was to be their safeguard and it was to be perpetuated through all generations to the close of Earth's history.

When I was, went in council with the Father before the world began.

So the garden has been something that God knew we needed from before time began.

And there we see to the end of Earth's history.

So, that's a little bit of why, why the garden?

Why, But I think why the garden is because that's the place that we can commune the most intimately with the Lord.

And I can say that whenever I lose my inner peace, my spiritual equilibrium, the place that I go is to the garden.

Or if I don't have the garden, I go to the beach.

So I just want to talk about some of the practical, the practical wise.

In the garden, You naturally learn the balance between faith and works.

If you don't do, if you don't plant the seed, you're not gonna reap the harvest.

If you don't cultivate, you're gonna have weeds.

You just naturally see this cooperative work and when you see it in nature, then you can apply it to your spiritual life.

God can do nothing to save us apart from our effort, but we can do nothing to save ourselves apart from his power.

So it's this beautiful cooperative work that we see in the garden that then we can apply to the spiritual life.

The results of neglect or forgetting are quickly seen.

So I could tell you a lot of stories about this.

1 I'll share, 1 of our boys, and I think it was Joshua who is, he's our farmer.

He decided he was going to grow tomato starts.

And we start them in a very small soil block and we use kind of, it's kind of like a little incubator.

You put a lid on it and you water them a couple of times a day and they kind of steam and it just gives them enough heat and moisture to get them started early.

So he was starting them in the late winter, early spring.

You know, they have to be watered twice a day.

And they're such tiny little plants that if you forget, there's not much recovery, which is just what happened.

You forget, they were forgotten for a whole day, and John noticed them, the poor little plants are all just laying flat out.

You know, you can come in and you can try to revive them, and the most resilient plants will truly revive, but most will not.

Some can handle more neglect or more hardship, and others can't.

So the line or the connection between, wow, that's a huge fly, Between cause and effect lie very close in the garden.

We've had many experiences ourselves where we neglected in the early years and where we reaped the consequences of our neglect.

Theressa Wood

Lessons from the Orchard

I hope you've had a wonderful, wonderful start to your day, and welcome to Families in Agriculture.

Today I'm going to be sharing with you some lessons from the orchard, And I hope you can find encouragement.

I noticed that a lot of the people who are coming into the family stream, surprise, surprise, are moms.

And that just makes me feel so very, very much at home because guess what, I'm a mom too.

Loving Heavenly Father, Lord, you know the words that I have to speak and I pray that they will be to your glory.

I thank you that your presence will be here with us now in your name I pray, amen.

We used to live in Gunnedah quite some years back out west And in our front yard was a tree, a tall, strong, young tree.

And it was just 1 of those trees that reminded me of Daniel.

You know the biblical character Daniel, who stood for what was right.

He was tall, he was strong, he was upright in character.

And this tree was just like that, tall, strong, and very, very straight.

And back then, we had little children, only 2 back then, and I used to say to my boys, that's the Daniel tree.

And I always used to like to point to that tree as a visual example to them of what Daniel was like, tall, strong, and upright in character.

And you know, I guess the character of Daniel is something that we still have to see today.

The way that a tree grows, everybody can see how it grows, can't it?

Everyone can see the strength, the bent, the shape, the character of a tree, just like we can see even now today, thousands of years later, we can still see and admire and want to strive for the character of Daniel.

There's a verse in Psalms that says that our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth.

When I read it, I read that our sons may be as trees grown up in their youth.

I don't know if you can see that picture too well because of the contrast in here but we now live only 45 minutes from here and we have another Daniel tree.

I don't know if you can see it, it's right in the middle there, and it's really tall, and it's really, really straight.

And guess what, now we've got 4 boys, and I say to them, That's the Daniel tree.

It's a visual example, as I say, of where I want them to grow.

And, you know, every day I see this tree and I'm challenged because that's what I want for them.

But it's what we do as parents that's going to hopefully encourage them to grow in that right direction.

And it's my greatest desire for them to grow like Daniel did, tall, straight, and upright in character.

Well, God's been teaching me a few lessons as he does lately.

I guess nothing particularly brand new necessarily, but you know, don't we need to just sometimes keep relearning the old lessons and being reminded again and again, because we so easily forget those things that we need to be applying in our everyday.

We only moved to our property 45 minutes away from here back in July, and so we haven't been there very long, but before we even moved there, we knew that our very, very first priority would be to put in an orchard.

We were going to put in an EG White orchard and we did a lot of planning before we even moved.

The plan was to put in 51 trees and to dig those great big gigantic metre by metre by metre holes and fill it with good mix and layers of soil and rock and everything else.

We've planted all sorts of things, everything from apples, avocados to mangoes and mandarins, black sapotes, pomegranate squavas, you name it, we've probably got it.

Some of the exotic things that are even a little bit hard to get your tongue around.

And We did a lot of planning for months and months.

We ordered the water tank that was going to water, we ordered the plumber to come in and put it in, we ordered the soil, the topsoil and the compost to all be dumped off, and then we finally moved.

And I tell you, even before all the boxes had been unpacked in the house, we were out there working on the orchard because this was priority number 1 for us.

I think there's a few photos here of some of the trees going in.

This is some of the hard work that went into putting in the orchard.

It was 1 thing to have the backhoe come in and dig out the holes, but then we had to refill the holes.

And that was a lot of fun and a lot of family work.

And that's some of the orchard with some of the new little baby trees.

Once it was in, The fun truly, truly began.

We thought we were doing everything right.

I personally have an absolute fascination in soil and so we thought we had everything organised.

We thought we had everything in order and we thought we'd done everything right but unbeknownst to us it was going to come back and bite us.

We ran into so many trouble and for a while there I didn't know was I over watering, was I under watering.

I'm a gardener, I'm a passionate gardener and I know how to care for gardens but I'll be honest I've never cared for trees before and this was a brand new experience for me.

We had leaves that were burning all around the edges or right across the entire leaf, just going brown.

And then we had leaves that were just falling off all over the place, everywhere, through the orchard.

There were some plants that somehow seemed to be doing okay, but there were too many that were really, truly struggling.

And I kept going to God in prayer over this.

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Series

Families in Agriculture

True Education and the Agrarian Life

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Communing with God in the Garden

52m

True Education and the Agrarian Life

54m

Lessons from the Orchard

39m

Food Preservation

1h 6m

Raising Entrepreneurial Evangelists

41m

Sound Doctrine