Above Rubies Daily Encouragement Blogs
Through the weekly and daily devotionals you can be constantly encouraged in your great role of parenting, the highest career in the nation. You can also stay updated on what's happening with the Above Rubies ministry.
GRINDING WHEAT
A postscript to the poem below.
Hannah was one of my lovely Above Rubies helpers. Her grandmother, Helen Walker, was one of my dear friends in New Zealand. I met her when I was a young mother, the first time to meet a mother with 12 children! She was filled with the grace and love of the Lord. This family was totally self-sufficient and grew all their own food.
Their dining room was like being in church. They had retrieved some beautiful stained glass windows from an old church which made the room look so amazing. She had poker-worked (I think you call it pyrography here in USA) the big wooden table with Scripture verses for the children to read and learn every day, and they had church pews around the table.
It was Helen who gave me the inspiration to begin grinding wheat for making bread. I had begun to make my own bread but Helen said something to me which aroused my attention.
“Nancy,” she said. “I started noticing an improvement in the health of all my children, not when I began baking bread, but when I began to grind the wheat freshly before each baking.”
That was a “good enough” testimony for me, so I thought I’d do it also. But where could I get a wheat grinder? There were none around back in those days. I had some friends who were farmers, and they owned a huge contraception which they used for griding grain for their pigs!
“Can I borrow your machine?” I asked. Every couple of weeks I would go out to their farm and grind my grain on this big machine! As the saying goes, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Eventually, my husband found a commercial coffee grinder and I used that for awhile, until eventually we found a wonderful stone ground mill.
Today we are blessed that we can purchase grinders that can fit on the kitchen counter. I use the Wonder Mill. My grinder never leaves my counter as I grind all my grain freshly. I no longer make bread as I used to. Today, I make sour dough bread and use spelt and rye grains. I love my bread. It has the most wonderful flavor.
I think a wheat grinder is one of the most important gadgets we can have in the kitchen. When you purchase flour, just think how long it may have been sitting in the shop losing all its goodness while it sits waiting for you to buy it. Even if I have some flour left over from grinding, I keep it in the fridge.
Love from Nancy Campbell
Picture: I found this old picture of grinding the wheat in an old Above Rubies magazine from February 1980! I am with Lois Jordan who used to do all the layout for Above Rubies. In those days we did not have computers, and she did it manually with “cut and paste.” Wow, I look a little younger in this picture!
