Heather Kristin

If you've been reading the Bible your entire life, you NEED to see this. 👆

The same Bible that told you a generation would stop getting married also tells you exactly what a family hands over during a famine, and in what order, and I had never once read past the part where Joseph is the hero. I did not have to look up the first one. A quarter of forty-year-olds in this country have never been married, the highest it has ever been, and I have three of them in my own family. Paul wrote that a day would come when men forbid to marry, and I have watched it come. I did not know the second chapter was in there until Pastor Ed sat at my kitchen table on Thursday, going through Gene's papers with me the way he does for the widows, and asked me if I had ever read what happens after the seven good years. Let me say one thing first. I am not one of those end times people. I am sixty-nine. I have read my Bible my whole life and I mostly read the Gospels. I have never once looked at a cattle price and thought about Pharaoh. So take this or leave it. I only want to tell you what happened at my table. Pastor Ed has had our church for twenty-nine years, in a county where half the congregation runs cattle. He married my daughter Beth. He buried Gene in June. This year he has buried three farms, which is what he calls it when a family sells the ground their grandfather cleared and moves to town. He is not a talker. He is a man who has sat at a lot of kitchen tables. The news was on in the other room. A man said ground beef had passed six dollars a pound for the first time since they started keeping records. Ed said, "You know why that is." I said the war, the fuel, whatever they say. He said, "Partly. Mostly it is that there are fewer cows in this country than at any time since 1951. I have watched them go. This year I have prayed with more families selling herds than in any year of my life. Whole herds. A family sells the cattle and keeps the land. Then a year later they sell the land." He said it flat. "That order matters. I did not understand why it always went in that order until I read a chapter I had preached a hundred times, and read it past the part everybody stops at." He asked me to get my Bible. Genesis forty-seven. I got it. He told me to start at verse fifteen and read it as a list. "And when money failed in the land of Egypt... all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread." He said, "Money first. Write that down." I got my pad. I wrote: Money. "Now sixteen." "And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail." "Cattle. Write it." I wrote: Cattle. "Now nineteen." "Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh." I wrote: Land. Then I wrote: Us. He said, "Now twenty." "And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh... so the land became Pharaoh's." Ed did not say anything for a minute. He let me look at the list on my pad. Money. Cattle. Land. Us. He said, "Now ask yourself what is left after the fourth one." I looked at it. There was nothing to write. I said, "Nothing. There is nothing after us." He said, "That is the chapter. The people who stored ate. The people who did not ended up owned. And the man doing the buying is the man every Sunday school calls the hero." I said Joseph was the hero. He saved Egypt. He said, "He did. And Egypt paid for it with everything Egypt had, in that order, because they had not stored anything themselves. It does not say the famine took their land. It says they sold it for bread." Then he said, "Here is why a pastor in a cattle county is telling you this. I have watched the first two lines of that list go through my congregation for three years, in the order the chapter says. The money went first. A family that could always make it to spring cannot make it to spring, because diesel is at a record and fertilizer is up by half and feed is up with it. So they sell the cattle. That is the herd at its smallest since 1951, and that is your six-dollar beef. And then, the next year, the land." He said, "The government's own count says foreign investors hold forty-six million acres of American farmland. Investment funds went from under two billion dollars of farmland to over sixteen billion. The software man everybody knows is the largest private farmland owner in the country. I have stood at the auction with a family whose ground went to a buyer whose name was a set of initials. The dirt is leaving the families. That is line three. It is happening in my county, this year, in the order the chapter says." I asked him who line four was. He said, "Genesis forty-seven does not name a villain. It names an order. Money. Cattle. Land. Us. A family with no food of its own ends up on that list, and the only way off it is to not need the bread." I said the government would never let it get to line four here. He said, "Before you say that, oh yes, they would. They stood by for line one and line two in my own county and called it the market. The government is forty trillion dollars in debt and at war. A broke household does not save the neighbor's farm. It watches it sell." Then he asked me the question. "Have you ever heard of Agenda 2030?" I said I had heard the name. He said, "Everybody has heard the name. Almost nobody has read it. It is a real United Nations document, on their own website, agreed to by every member country in 2015. The deadline is in the title. And running through it is food. Who grows it, how, what gets planted and what gets phased out." He said, "You have heard the line. You will own nothing and you will be happy. People argue about who said it. I do not care who said it. It is in your Bible, chapter forty-seven, with a hero doing the buying. Own nothing is what a famine does to a family that did not store. And there is a document with a date on it about the food." He said, "Count the growing seasons between this fall and 2030." I counted them on my kitchen calendar. Three. I asked him what he wanted me to do. He said, "Not what Egypt did. What Joseph did. He filled the storehouse in the years it was easy, when nobody thanked him for it. Genesis forty-one, thirty. All the plenty shall be forgotten." He said, "Grow your own food. Start this season. Not the one after." I said, "Ed, I am sixty-nine and I sold Gene's trailer because I cannot keep cattle." He said, "I did not say cattle. I said food. Buckets. Potting soil. Water. A back step with sun. Lettuce, beans, tomatoes. You are not going to feed Egypt. You are going to keep four people off the list." I told him about my hip. He said, "Set the buckets on a table. Waist height. You will never bend over once. And let your granddaughter plant. She will remember it longer than the sermon." I asked what if I kill them all. He said, "Then you killed a few dollars of seed in a year when it cost nothing to learn." I asked what if none of it happens. He said, "Then you have a box of seed in the closet that cost less than a tank of gas and a pastor who talks too much at kitchen tables. I have made my peace with that." Then he stopped being gentle, the only time. He said, "But if it does, and you have not done this, I have sat with families the night they sold the thing they said they would never sell. Every one of them thought they had another year. Nobody ever has another year. I am not willing to sit at this table for that." He said the seed has to be heirloom. Hybrid comes back weak or not at all, so you buy it again every spring on somebody else's terms. Heirloom means the harvest gives you next year's seed for free. He said that is the one thing on the list of things Pharaoh could not buy, because it makes more of itself. He keeps a sealed vault of it in the church pantry and one at each of his three kids' houses. The one he keeps is called Nuvera. Over sixteen thousand seeds. Thirty-five varieties, mostly vegetables. Non-GMO, untreated. Sealed so it keeps for years in a cool dark closet. Under sixty dollars. Ninety days to send it back. He said, "It is sixty dollars of seed and a job to do, not a miracle. Most of it stays sealed. A little goes in a bucket this month." Then he said something a man passing a collection plate would never say. "Do not take my word for any of it. Do not buy anything because I said it. Check four things." One. Read Genesis forty-seven, fifteen through twenty. Write the four things down in order. Then write what comes after the fourth. Two. Go to your store and price ground beef. Then look up the size of the American cattle herd. Smallest since 1951. Three. Find the government's own count of foreign-owned farmland. Forty-six million acres. Four. Find Agenda 2030 on the website of the people who wrote it, and count the growing seasons left. "If all four come back the way I say, then get seed. Not because of me. Because you checked." Here is what I did over the next three days. Friday the list went on the refrigerator. Money. Cattle. Land. Us. Saturday I priced ground beef at my store. Six dollars and forty cents a pound. I stood in the aisle and looked up the herd on my phone. Eighty-six million head. Smallest in seventy-five years. Sunday I found the document. The year is in the title. Three springs on my calendar. My daughter Beth told me Saturday I was reading too much into a sermon at a kitchen table. Monday she called back. She had read the chapter to her husband. She had never read past the coat of many colors either. She ordered two. I ordered three. One for me, one for my son Mark, one for my sister. Then I did the thing I feel worst about. I waited four days to tell the women at church, because I did not want to be the woman who sends links, and when I did, six of the ten wrote back that the page said out of stock. It came back Thursday. I do not know for how long. Mark's went to him Sunday. He said "okay Mom" and put it on the shelf in the garage, next to Gene's old tools. That is a thank-you from Mark. I am not one of those end times people. I just like being ready. Ed has twenty-nine years of kitchen tables and one vault in the church pantry, and that is enough of a prepper for me. Here is the one he keeps: >> https://bynuvera.co/products/vegetable-seed-vault-kit If you have read your Bible your whole life, read that chapter tonight before you decide anything about me or about him. Money. Cattle. Land. Us. The people who stored ate. P.S. On the stock, because six women from my church could not get one this week. It goes in and out and moves with the news. Check before you decide anything. Being early costs sixty dollars. Being late costs a growing season. P.P.S. What Ed told me to check. Ground beef above six dollars a pound, the government's own price index. The herd at about eighty-six million head, the smallest since 1951, the USDA's own count. Foreign investors holding forty-six million acres, the USDA's own farmland report. A quarter of forty-year-olds never married, the Pew count. And the plan: https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda. None of it is a blogger. P.P.P.S. What it is. Over sixteen thousand heirloom seeds, thirty-five varieties, mostly vegetables, non-GMO, untreated, sealed for years. Potting soil, water, sun. Buckets on a table, waist height. Under sixty dollars, ninety days back. P.P.P.P.S. If you are thinking a full freezer instead, Ed's answer came from twenty-nine years of watching what families sell. A freezer is line two. It belongs to the power company and it dies the hour the power does. A seed is the one thing in the house that was not on Pharaoh's list, because it makes more of itself. A pantry is a countdown. A garden is a supply.