I promised that I would eventually explain the name of our farm to you in a blog.
Our Name: Eighth Day Farm.
It is not an easy thing to explain but I am going to try. Brian and I get it totally, which is really what is important. We are the ones that need to understand the meaning.
This farm, this land, this move has been directed by God. Is it not a conscious decision on our part to move here. We had thought we were living in our “forever” home before this one. It seems sometimes we choose “good” but often God has “better”, even if we cannot see it.
But God…
It is equally hard to explain how we hear God speak, but we know we do. We have been practicing walking with God for long enough to know when we hear Him.
We heard Him.
Back in 2017, God said, “write the book and buy the field,” He was talking to me.
I wrote the book, “The Complete Love Circle” and released it in November 2017.
Then we started looking for “the field”. We looked and looked for 3 years for something that we did not know what we were looking for or why. But look we did. East to Valleyview, north to Peace River, not really south, but in the Gr. Prairie area, and then west to Dawson Creek we looked. After we had found our “field” in June 2020, we realized we had looked at over 20 “fields” in the west area and all within close proximity to each other. Perhaps we are slow learners, but we had not realized there was a "west" theme.
The moment we drove up to our “field” we knew it was the one. We had no idea what we were to do with it, or even how to buy it! We had just bought our “forever” house in Gr. Prairie and moved in just over a month prior. Financially there was no way we could buy a “field” at this point.
The Eighth Day.
Every word of the Bible is rich with meaning; there is not a wasted word. God says that the Bible was written as men were carried along in the spirit, it is the divine inspired word of God.
See: 2 Peter 1:21, 2 Timothy 3:16, 1 Corinthians 2:13
Numbers in the Bible have meaning. The number 7 is a number of completeness, completion, perfection. God rested on the 7th day, Egypt suffered 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine, Naaman had to dip in the Jordan river 7 times to be healed of leprosy, how many times are we to forgive? 77 times!
The number 40 is used in many instances with trails and temptations: it rained 40 days and nights in the time of Noah and the ark. Jesus went out in the wilderness to be tempted 40 days, the Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert before entering the Promised land.
One of the things I never clued into in my reading of the Bible over the years is: The Eight Day. I can safely say I had not heard of the 8th day, and yet it is in the Bible, I missed it.
How can there be an 8th day you ask? Glad you did.
Yes, there are only 7 days in a week, but what happens after day 7? 7 is the end of the week, it completes the week, so what is the 8th day?
There are actually a lot of passages in the Bible that talk about the 8th day.
Genesis 17:10-11, Leviticus 12:3 – a male child shall be circumcised on the 8th day.
Leviticus 23:39 – “On the 15th day of the 7th month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the Lord 7 days. On the 1st day shall be a solemn rest, and on the 8th day shall be a solemn rest.”
Leviticus 23:36 – “For 7 days you shall present food offerings to the Lord. On the 8th day you shall hold a holy convocation and present a food offering to the Lord. It is a solemn assembly; you shall not do any ordinary work.”
Nehemiah 8:18 – “And day by day, from the 1st day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God. They kept the feast 7 days, and on the 8th day there was a solemn assembly, according to the rule.”
John 21:26 – “8 days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them, “Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
It is fairly out there thinking isn’t it to think of the 8th day coming after completion?
But what happens after completion is exactly that: out there thinking, out of the box, supernatural, it is beyond the natural, it is the transfer of finite to infinite, it is a God day.
What happens on the 8th day is totally a God thing. It really is giving up the “good” to gain the “best”.
The 8th day is about breaking out of the normal, stepping over the limits, not being bound by the finite and stepping into the new, the supernatural, aligning with the infinite and living the life of the blessed. 8th day living is living beyond what you or I can do and walking in step with God.
For Brian and I, this farm, this land, has been all about what we “could not do” and resting in the fact that God can do all things. We stepped over the 7th day, opened our arms, hearts and lives to the 8th Day where we now stand and watch to see what God will do.