Winter is visiting again. Dreaming of my ideal housing.

I really don't like all this cold weather.  I am beginning to understand the snowbird mentality.  :-)  Maybe a smaller place to live, like my dream "tiny house," would be better for my senior years.  I don't want a mobile tiny house, my dream is "small on a foundation."

A long time ago I spent a lot of time making drawings of small house designs that might be used for Working Together communities.  I made one for 15x20 and then larger versions.  Every household has different needs.  I was trying to find a way to meet these varied needs within a larger community.  

For myself, I finally decided that what I needed was a 40' x 40' workspace on the ground floor, a 30' x 30' housing space on top of that, set into a corner so I could have a porch area, and a roof that was sturdy enough to let me build a garden space on it.  Because of my aging issues, I wanted a small elevator that could go to the roof garden.  That was the extent of my design vision for myself.  I didn't get into the details of the building.

Making a drawing is different than living in a space.

It took me a long time to realize the square footage of my dream housing would have been the same as my son's house.  That was an "ah ha" moment.  A 30x30 living space is small.  I based it on a small one-bedroom apartment I lived in at one time.  But adding the workspace makes it into a large single-family dwelling size.  Plus the garden area.

I wondered how much it would cost to build, and how this principle could be applied to community members.  My design was for my needs.  Other families would need different solutions.

Remember, I was thinking about building a place Christians would be able to go to as their lives were hurting from persecution.  We would need to build communities and all the things communities need to survive.

Food. Shelter. Housing. and then all the things families need, but at a very basic level.  That would be a doctor but may not be a comprehensive care.

Tiny houses are really great.  Small housing is great.  Shared housing is also important.  We would have to find a way to care for each other... eventually, without any cash.

Off-grid becomes essential.  I don't know if we could create a combination (a hybrid) of resources, but that would be useful.

I suppose everything would start with the property.  Where the water is, what kind of animals we would need to protect ourselves from, and hunt for food, and the roads we would need.  It's like becoming a city planner without the education.  More like the wild west before zoning laws.

On my website I have a statement about the End Times and Christians.  How many of us will there be when the Antichrist finally becomes a threat to our lives?  We really don't know.

I decided we need at least one community in every country possible to start with.  There won't be a lot of transportation options for those times.  Horses may become the only choice, for farming and getting around.

It changes every concept of survival to think about life without money and resources we have been used to having.

Taxes become the biggest threat to living anywhere.  The government becomes a tool to overcome all our efforts to live independently.

It is an impossible problem.

How all this will unfold is not known, but prophecy tells us it is coming.  Our lives tell us the Antichrist is very near.

In Christ,  Deborah Martin

https://work2gather.us

Food and prepping - big topics in my life.

Seems I am still working on my schedule.  

I get involved in YouTube videos at night and lose track of time.  I was watching some garden and prepping videos tonight.

Today I started working in my container garden space for this year.

In my downsizing efforts I rediscovered my larger (older) plastic containers, which are what I wanted to do this year.  Now I won't have to buy new ones.  I'm working out which ones to use and which ones not to use.

I have to uses a soldering tip to make drainage holes in the one's I finally decide on.  So, this becomes a permanent decision.

Way back when I discovered you could buy your own recycling bins.  Those would be my ideal container.  Thick, hard plastic, with drainage holes already placed.  Maybe in the future, after I win a big lottery prize.  They are costly.

My recycling side also wanted to collect the newspaper delivery boxes to use in my gardens.  They also are sturdy thick plastic with drainage holes already placed.

One of the videos I watched tonight used old Styrofoam boxes (like shipping boxes for cold food) to grow sweet potatoes (which looked like yams to me) over 60 days.  He seemed to grow quite a few in one box.  I don't know if I want to use Styrofoam for food, but I use to think that was what the little white things in bagged soil was.  I thought that would be a good way to reuse Styrofoam and help soften hard soil, mostly for houseplants.  I have a lot to learn still.  :-)  

I will use my smaller containers for growing other things... maybe all the trees I am working on.

Food is such a big issue for everyone.  I know that much of the food I have to buy is modified, but I don't know how.  I notice it in the skins of potatoes and tomatoes, in the lack of the right smell in some apples, and other things.  If I could grow more, I would know where the food was coming from and it would be as organic as I can make it.  Organic seed is also important.  Heirloom seeds are the historical plants that existed before modern efforts to make production changes that help the shipping and selling issues of foods we buy in the stores.

I watched a video awhile back by Jeff Smith, of Genetic Roulette (movie) fame, which shared that the changes made for these selling traits have also changed the health benefits of our foods.  They aren't as healthy as they use to be, before they were modified.  We don't really know about these things unless the food is tested and labeled.

At my age, I wonder how much it matters for me.  I don't really know.  I just know I haven't been able to build the life I wanted to.  I wish more for my children and others in this world.

I always come back to the place GOD has in all these things.

And I wonder how different our world would be if I had been able to create the life I hoped for my children and me, and for Working Together.  (https://work2gather.us) We never know how much our lives affect this world.  This is one reason I love "It's A Wonderful Life" and watch it over and over.  We are becoming Pottersville instead of Bedford Falls.  

I continue to work on the details for this year.  My hope is to find the things I need to do the tasks I want to accomplish.  I am trying to find the place to start, how to continue, and which destination is the most important for GOD's Plan for my life.  

We all seem to be doing the same search.  It seems like that to me, anyway.

In Christ,

Deborah Martin

What the future holds

I just watched a YouTube video with the music from Braveheart.  It's been a very long time since I watched the movie.  This music video shared the meaning of the story as the instrumental music played in the background.  It was a very great display of the critical parts of the story.  Childhood love and loss, then the return, then the love that seemed to last through their separation, secret marriage, and the deaths of each.

I did watch another version of the music but decided to save the one with the story.  You can see it here.  I am still crying about it.

https://youtu.be/_Dxi2XOTrDI?si=0eRPZL5uAqRhypyk 

It reminds me how hard it is to be someone's enemy.

I watched several videos over the past several days about the homosexuality issue and the Word of God.  Old videos.  I didn't even remember I had saved them.  There is always the opinion in the gay community that they can change the Word to suite their needs.  They want the approval of their choices, the submission of God and His People.  

One sermon I watched, by Grace to You (John MacArthur), was also painful to watch.  https://youtu.be/h0GqVyYYfHc?si=B6824yGUvYK61S1K   It does have many parts in the sermon that talk about the process history has gone through and the real need inside the hearts and lives of those who have lived in that community.  It is difficult to know the Truth unless you were raised with it as a child.  The LGBT community doesn't allow conversations about GOD and Truth.

I was raised in the Los Angeles area and know what it is like to live there.  I wouldn't know about dealing with the gay community one-on-one in the way a pastor would, but I know the effects it has on communities.  The gay lobby has only become more powerful since I was a child.  It has grown more abusive of others over the years, as I know of them.  I suppose they grew more strategic in how they dealt with their need for approval, and their enemies.  

I suppose those are the tactics of war.

I always wondered what group of people the Antichrist would come from.  He hates GOD, but there are many different people groups who hate Him.  We know about Hitler, and there have been other countries and groups in history that became angry and violent toward the ones that disagreed with them.  It is possible someone from the gay community will rise into the place of the Antichrist.  

We know he is a false person - pretending to be good until gains power over the globe.  I hope I am getting my details right... the timeline.  I know he pretends to be good.  I don't remember when that changes into someone who orders those who refuse the MARK of the Beast to be killed.

It is going to be a very hard time to be alive... especially for Christians.

I also watched video documentaries about spyware (Pegasus) already in use globally, about inflation, about increasing population issues.  The thing no one talks about is disastrous events that may reduce the population more than anyone could ever predict... or terrorists that have planned their own way to reduce populations they consider unwanted, like Christians and Jews and the elderly and the disabled and....

Natural disasters like the overdue earthquakes on the west coast of America could become worse than we think.  One plate called Juan de Fuca is 600 miles of coastline long, and the San Andreas fault goes from Baja to Alaska I think... to San Francisco at least.  If they are connected underground, the whole west coast could go.  There might not be a Silicon Valley one of these days.  And no Hollywood.

GOD judges sin.

We have a lot of sin in the world now.

Climate change is blamed for every weather issue that now happens.  I watched a video that shared the government was seeding the sky to create weather disasters.  I don't hear much about that.

We don't hear about pollution and its effects anymore.  Every disaster is attached to Climate Change.

Weather affects our food supplies.

GOD tells us there will be famines and drought.  We may want it to be called Climate Change, but there are cycles to the Earth, and pollution affects our food supplies.  The enlarging of the Sun affects our solar system, and the atmosphere we need to protect us.

The authorities that do not believe in GOD will never talk about these issues.  I don't think they can even know what kind of effect the natural consequences of our global actions will have.

Atomic bombs and nuclear energy disasters would release deadly radiation that would never be controlled and take a long time to go away. 

Genetically modified food may have consequences we don't know about yet.

I suppose I could go on and on.  I have years of discovering things that could become our future.

In the end, we only know what GOD has told us in the Bible, and that is not clear.  The big events we know.  We don't know how they will happen.  We have to watch the times we live in.

I don't think any other generation has had digital currency to worry about.  Or the microchip "tool" that government wants to implant in our bodies.  Or the connection of the two.

We are definitely very close to the MARK of the Beast, and that is attached to the Antichrist.  

My question has always been :: How do we prepare for that time in history?