Question and Answer - December 2020

hey guys welcome to montana haven in case this is your first time watching us i'm jos and i'm priscilla and we have five wonderful children ranging in ages from 5 to 14. and uh today we're going to share with you your questions that you posted on our comments we posted a video called chat with us and we asked you to post comments or questions and you guys did amazing you posted a lot of questions so we're going to try to work through that today we might not be able to hit all the questions but we'll do our best yeah and get as many as we can and some of them are so good questions i told priscilla that we'd have to make a whole video of just the one questions and the one question so right we're gonna try to answer them as best we can and as fast as we can we may have to like run through it yeah and kind of you know uh just do our best so this is gonna be our december question and answer 2020. so here we go go ahead okay i think the first question that came in uh asked it was from veronica and it says how do you guys deal with storms and hurricanes and tornadoes so we actually don't have tornadoes or hurricanes around here right so because we live in the mountains we live in the northwest corner of montana and we have literally we're looking out the window right here to the mountains and it's a wilderness uh so which means uh you can't take any motors or anything and then there's it's tall there's tall mountains so there's snow in the mountains all year round so we're blocked by mountains and we have hills tall hills small mountains behind us so we don't get any hurricanes or any tornadoes and not too many storms yeah so it's great that way okay darius asks i enjoy going barefoot whenever i can and now that i'm retired i only wear shoes when i have to i notice you guys go barefoot a lot too is it an amish thing now i think it probably is an amish thing depends on there's many different layers of amish uh i would think that some of the more conservative amish typically go barefoot a lot more but i mean we grow up barefoot i think it's just because there's usually a lot of children in one family and so uh shoes are valuable in the summertime you just go barefoot children just go barefoot and and it is healthy for them i mean they get immunity by going barefoot around the you know the farm and the garden so they think it's awful when they have to wear shoes yeah our children even during the summer time they go to church barefoot and even i i know that [Music] there's certain communities i've been to where the people go to church barefoot actually so it depends on where you come from but yeah i think it's pretty pretty normal too but you see a lot of amish people going barefoot not so much when you go out go to town but just around the house always yes a lot of times perfect right your next priscilla uh rachel asks what's your favorite christmas memory or traditions so for me uh growing up christmas was very special for us we didn't have christmas trees or we hardly decorated anything like we had no course no electricity we had no uh christmas lights or anything like that but my favorite my favorite memories are of christmas morning my father and my mom and dad would put our plates by our places at the table and they would fill it up with like nuts candies and each and orange and sometimes and then a little gift like a book or mittens or like maybe a little doll just uh it was very special they would cover it with a blanket through the night so we for sure wouldn't see it and then in the morning my dad would call up from the stairway with with his uh kerosene lamp and he would uh tell us when it's ready for us to come down and we would always you know we would do it early christmas morning was still dark we would run down the stairs and we would find our places at the table and find our gifts and that was just that's a special memory for me yeah i think each family probably has their own memories and christmas varies uh in amish households on some celebrate it some do not at all so we kind of went through stages my family um we went through stages where we had gifts and then uh we didn't do gifts and then we decided for i think it's we love traditions this is a little bit of a lot of beating path there but i think traditions are good good traditions and and we've decided as a family to create our traditions yeah things that that create memories and things that we can do every year and and so there's you know we're always kind of making new traditions and some sometimes we forget some of the other ones a little bit uh one thing that we usually do and we'll do this later uh in one of the videos we should go out this might sound funny to you but i think it's really cool it's fun for us we go and we the day before christmas we clean the chicken coop completely clean it and we put fresh straw and deep bedding in there again and you just we do that like a couple times a year so it just falls on christmas and then in the evening do we go out with a lantern that would be christmas eve yeah christmas eve just yep after dark and we go in there and we hang the lantern in the chicken coop and the chickens are all in their roots and we go in there and we read the christmas story together so we've really enjoyed doing that and so we'll probably do that again this year so yep that's uh thanks for that question there so this um mary says how did i get an amish pen pal an older woman um how would you do that i i wouldn't know unless she'd have an address of right you know there's this amish newspaper called the budget and almost every amish community writes a column in there like monthly at least and if you subscribe to the budget you would get all the amish news from everywhere now i'm not advocating getting the budget but there's probably in there you would find ways if you got that to find somebody to write to us i don't even know how they would get that though the budget because it's but i guess not just google yeah it's not an amish write it okay yeah or publish it i should say publish it yeah so it's called the budget okay and uh daniella asked does the heart of the mountain will it get translated into german um you know i don't know that right not at this time yeah not at this time it depends on how much the book sells i guess yeah yep okay so um it says what is one thing that you prefer buying now rather than making yourself when you were amish well my wife's gonna probably say clothes yeah cuz it's some you like i like to sew but i like to sew certain things but you had to sew everything you know before except underwear yeah except underwear socks so i'm now i'm glad i i can only you know i can sew what i want and buy what i don't want to sew so that is what right yep becky ray also asked about christmas she's wondering if we're going to do a video before christmas and so we try to do two videos a week it's it's probably more like one and a half videos a week or something because it's kind of hard to get them all done but we're we're doing our best um but so we'll have another one or two this video she was asking about that one video that special video that's okay okay so we don't know for sure when it's we're planning we're going to do premiere so just watch our channel i'm actually working on editing right now um and we're hoping to have it out the weekend of christmas so we'll premiere a few days before if we can if we can get it done and upload it and everything and then just watch for the our channel and then you can see when it's going to be ready to be watched yeah um corey corey asks what do mennonite ramesh do to stay healthy and what are the best tips and herbs for best health and well-being that's probably the video in itself right there yeah i'm not i mean just for a quick i would say like even just going having the children go barefoot all summer well tell us why don't you tell them what we do this is our morning routine oh right well another thing also is most amish i don't know about the mennonites so much but almost all amish families have big gardens and throughout the summer they build immunity by just eating raw and fresh things from their garden so that is one big thing and one thing that jos and i do every morning as soon as we get up we it's such a simple thing but it's cleansing and alkalizing it alkalizes your body as hot as you can drink it and we add like a tablespoon of vinegar and a tablespoon of lemon juice organic lemon juice and if we have if we can find it i also add organic ginger liquid ginger and sometimes i don't have that on hand but i almost always use uh organic vinegar apple cider vinegar and lemon juice and i pour it in there and it's pretty sour sour in the beginning in the beginning but you get used to it but it's really good it's clean i mean it's it's good for you and it's cleansing so we that's just one thing we do every day when you get apple cider vinegar either you can get different brands but make sure it's called right on the front label it says with the mother so it's it's like not purified as much so just look for apple cider vinegar with the mother yeah and that's really good and just that really in itself helps me uh i think a lot so you know we get up i'm usually up an hour and a half two hours before i leave the house um and during that time i will always use the restroom um eliminate have a bowel movement which you know that's just part of life somebody will talk about it but it just helps me makes my body feel good i go out the door i have food in my stomach and i have no leftovers from the night before and so i you know you eliminate in the morning and it just makes you feel good and healthy so that's one thing that we do yeah so that's yeah i really love that okay so uh dj says he's got some burning or sorry he or she you have some burning questions dj my understanding is that the biggest difference between the amish and mennonite is shunning although you are no longer strictly hardcore amish do you or your family still practice shunning what are your feelings about shunning and number two well let me answer that one again that's number two is a different question so shunning so unfortunately um the amish and men and i have strayed very far from the original anabaptist or is another word for re-baptizers uh out of switzerland germany there are the early roots unfortunately a lot of a lot of it has turned religious and religion is made by man and it's not doesn't come from god god looks for relationship not religion so unfortunately the sad news is that shunning is one of those things that's been that has been misused a lot misinterpreted misused so the amish will practice that a lot um and i guess do we our families practice shunning um no no no we don't not not at all in the typical sense i believe the bible talks about that but uh i can't think of an instance where we've shunned anybody so um our heart is to do it if there's a place to do it biblically and not just do it religiously the good news is there are many amish again that we've said many times before our heart is for the amish and there are many wonderful things that's just one thing that is often misused unfortunately so that's that you want me to answer the next one because about horses uh what are your feelings about horses especially draft horses do you miss them or are you glad to be rid of them um so i grew up farming um as well as building log homes i remember when i was eight and nine years old we had about a five acre or so potato field where my dad grew potatoes and it was my job along with another family dad's nephew had two two sons just a little bit older one and one a little one my age it was our three boys job to um take the horses out there and cultivate and keep keep the weeds out of there and then we had a big family get together and we all picked up potatoes we dug them with horses so i drove a three horse uh three draft horses together when i was i think nine nine ish eight to ten probably around nine and so we've i did that for a summer and then when we moved to libby where we live live now uh we also had i i actually was in charge of the the field of farming so i mowed the hay rake the hay bale the hay all with horses and i enjoyed it but it's a lot of work and it was so much easier when we finally got a tractor uh so in a nutshell horses are great we love horses we have a horse we don't have a draft horse but we have a writing horse but as far as working them it is way easier with a tractor it's a lot faster and uh so there you go on that answer yeah dev asks what is the difference between amish church and mennonite church and your doctrine that's probably a video in itself right there yeah if there's just a quick way to answer so look can i just say something about that i think the quick answer is amish tend to be more conservative mennonites tend to be more liberal in their dress and in their lifestyle yes that's that's the the quick answer and then also on the side note is they both came out of the reformation uh the amish tended to follow a man by the name of jacob almond which amish comes from and mennonites followed a man that was called menno simons where men it comes from so just kind of created two streams very similar beliefs but tweaks some amish won't actually do not know the plan of salvation but most mennonites will know the planets right so mennonites are more liberal in their everything in their beliefs typically there's conservative meta knight yeah like there's horse and buggy mennonite and and then there's mennonites that you couldn't tell from anybody else but um as far as outwardly the clothes and lifestyle so there's range as well as there is with amish hopefully that helps you okay um so sally asks how would you set up your garden so one who cannot walk or lift uh much weight so that's tough to have a garden if you can't bend over because gardening requires a lot of bending over i think one thing that would help is raised beds yeah we don't have raised beds but that would help if you could get somebody to build you some boxes then you can just garden that at height instead of having to bend down to the ground yeah at the level you sit or you know stand or sit on either side close enough so that you can work on either side if you want you know yeah with your hand i'd suggest that okay this is from cheryl we probably can't answer everyone she's quite a few but um she asks i'm curious to know how you may identify yourself mennonite or still amish so we came from the amish and uh we feel we never left them but we just changed some things for us cheryl also asks what are your thoughts about serving your country i know that you believe in voting i was curious as to serving the armed forces so first of all i probably um just this is just me personally maybe this sounds contradictive i don't know but i first of all i support all those that are part of the armed forces and part of the military thank you for all you do for our country and did for our country i mean really really grateful and i i value that highly uh the sacrifices yeah personally i i don't feel like i would want to um go out just because i i wouldn't want to kill somebody if i had to that's just me personally i appreciate everybody that does that but that's just where i'm at i i wouldn't want to go physically in in war or be part of that just because of that's my personal conviction i wouldn't want that for myself to be in that situation where i had to make a choice so but i know that some do that for our country and we really appreciate right and yeah so thank you again for doing that that's just where i am at as a personally if someone would want to go join the armed forces i would have no problem with that just me personally i wouldn't want to be in that situation so and jim uh says here and jim i want to say i'm sorry about this on behalf of the amish people and it depends i think on the community that you that you're at but uh you said you sell hate to the amish farmers and for decades and they're some unfamous people that you know and i just want to say i'm sorry about that um it's not our heart to do that i think if somebody's unfriendly it means they're unhappy which means they don't know the love of christ they don't know the love of the lord so they're unhappy because they're searching so like i said unfortunately amish a lot of it is religion and so they they probably don't know the lord and so they're unhappy and so that makes them unfriendly so sorry about that and um bonnie you said i would love if priscilla could do a tutorial about how she does her hair and makeup and then there were a few other comments saying they would like it too i'm trying her to get her to do it i'm a little bit uncomfortable doing that i'm not sure why but i love doing hair and i love doing you know i love doing my makeup just because i think there's i'm artistic a little bit and it seems like a work of art working with hair and makeup so that's why i do it but you know for makeup actually i use all natural product i use lemongrass spa i'm sure some of you have heard of it before and we don't sell it no we don't sell it we just i just get it from someone and yeah because most makeup actually has like a lumen or heavy metals in it so i just didn't want that so i use natural stuff and whenever there's like a wedding or something they always come to her to do their hair so not always but yeah almost always oh okay there may have been once anyways there she's known around here to do hair so i always encourage her to uh show other people okay going to the next question how are we doing here um so holly asked i was curious if you all celebrate christmas and then what traditions we kind of talked about that a little bit already we do celebrate it and we celebrate it because the birth of christ yes and we can celebrate in july or june or august but we may sell it well celebrate it when everybody else does and so that's why we celebrate christmas and i i know there's all kinds of things out there about paganism and all this stuff and for us it's just we celebrate christmas because we love what christ did for us he came to the world as a baby he rose again and he lived he died and we celebrate that fact and so that's why we celebrate christmas okay emcee lemay i'm not sure if i said that right you said um i'm a mom to eight and struggle to get the extra weight off how do you keep fit and what is your typical diet i just i don't feel like i have any answers there but like i said earlier how we start off the morning with drinking lemon water or you know vinegar water that really helps and just drinking a lot of water throughout the day that actually fills you up and i used to do you know some exercises couple day days a week but i haven't been so good lately so i can't really say anything about that i'm you know [Music] i'm off you know i'm going a lot i'm running around doing things and you know i don't really know one thing though is we don't use any heavy processed sugar like any white sugar at all we use some sukinat sugar it's like a low process it's that i will use and whenever i do desserts i only use about half the amount of sugar that it usually asks for so just little lifestyle changes is actually what count i feel in your diet if you just because if you try to do a whole big regimen of stuff you usually start you know you throw it out because you can't keep up with it so you just do slow and easy lifestyle changes right i hope that helps yeah yes and your second question emcee is from my understanding many amish don't believe in a personal relationship with jesus christ what do you believe regarding jesus and his gift of salvation so yes we do believe that christ came as a baby in the earth and that he lived on this earth and that he died and he rose again and through that we can have the gift of salvation and live for him here and in eternity yeah so if you don't know that love we invite you to know that love because the father god loves us tremendously and we hope that you can see it in our lives in our hearts because we desire to share the good news it's the good news it's not religion it's good news so that's it's wonderful so yes we do believe that okay christine um you said how cold does it get in montana [Music] it doesn't get as cold here as it does in some places in the east um if we get like below zero that's pretty cold here um if you get 20 below zero that's exceedingly cold last year i don't know if it got below the teens no bottom if you got below in the teens even and but here we don't get hardly any wind at all it's um very calm and this when it snows the snow will sit on the fence post and it'll actually sit on like uh the barbed wire fence it'll hang over on the rails and it's just it just settles down peacefully and it's quiet it builds up and it doesn't get it's very dry as well we don't get um high humidity summer or winter so it doesn't feel that cold and if it's not windy it just it's it's nice and if it's really cold outside like 10 or 00 degrees then it's usually completely clear so the sun is shining and the sky is blue and it's very pretty there's a few questions that are kind of similar joanna asks um i don't know if you've discussed this previously but i just wondered why you left the amish when you did leave so again joanna we grew up amish and we just made a slow transition we never left we were actually never shunned just because we slowly change a little bit our lifestyle so in our hearts we're still amish we dress a little bit differently we're progressive non-traditional the amish would not call us amish right but we still just we just say that's who we are because that's how we grew up right yeah and but when we started transitioning that was about 16 years ago right so right and it's been previously you know the amish tend to say either you're amish and you have to look this way yeah or then you're english and you look like something else but i don't know who made those rules because right i sure didn't and uh nobody explained them to me so we just we're still amish nobody said we have to be called something different just because we look a little bit different that's our heritage it's our culture so that's what we do that's who we are yeah cynthia fisher you asked do you speak pennsylvania dutch and uh yes we do missions so if you've seen some of our previous videos you've noticed that i grew up speaking pennsylvania dutch uh which is called schwebisch it actually comes from a place in germany called schwabland it's actually schwaben it's actually a place in germany which my my father and brother have visited and they speak almost exactly like we do with a little bit of a they have more german words we lost them during the words uh dutch comes from deutsche which actually means german so it's nothing to do with dutch but pennsylvania deutsche which is now known as dutch so yes that's how i grew up speaking and you grew up speaking a little bit different dialect yeah a swiss german dialect so we actually speak her dialect to the children because there's fewer of those around and we want them to know both dialects so what happened is though and our children have this little bit of a mixture of swiss german pennsylvania dutch and english that they mix together but we're trying to keep them keep it pure serene but it's a little bit hard it's called jinglisher just a warmer or something swiss german i don't know susan asks uh my question is how did priscilla learn english um the same way he did we just when we went to school first grade we started uh we learned english in school well we usually could speak it a little bit before we went to school we just picked it up right just from hearing our brothers and sisters or older people right and did you both go to eighth grade in a one-room school house yes yes we did margaret asks is that an electric fireplace so in the last video when we did the chat with us video we were sitting beside a fireplace and yes that is an electric fireplace that's upstairs actually in our guest bedroom so um sometimes we go up there for a different scenery right we have a wood fireplace down here okay scrolling through here a lot of you mentioned you got the books uh that we mentioned and if you're wondering what books we're talking about uh her brother wrote a book and her dad wrote a book and my dad wrote a book go back to the video called chat with us a couple of videos back and you'll see the links in the description box and uh thanks for all of you that ordered books they really appreciate that so thank you for that i hope you find them interesting and the elo family asks what are your respective sets of parents doing these days with the freedom they found do they maintain a preference for the older wage traditions or they incorporate some of the changes we've made is there a source of conden contention um and all those things so the answer is uh yes to yes and no to all that yes there both of our parents are with us in the community um do they maintain a preference for the older ways and incorporate some of the newer ways yes the answer is yes um is there ever source of contention well there always can be but no matter with who you live right um we love our parents both of us do um and i don't think we probably see everything exactly but you know we don't think we have to right the key is that we walk together that's the whole thing and if we tend to disagree on the things that we disagree with then we can't be in harmony and that's what we don't want and it doesn't matter if it's our parents or our children or yeah anybody so that's sometimes we are just okay uh to disagree about some things we're okay about it you know and we still love one another right okay ann has a couple of books uh questions favorite baked goods are your favorite baked goods to make at christmas time and what traditions you have so favorite bakers do you have well i don't know if we really have favorite but we always make some kind of pies like cherry pies pumpkin pies or cream pies and of course we usually make some really good breads i i will make some my some of my braided breads maybe or just some good regular bread that we eat fresh and of course pumpkin rolls i have a pumpkin log roll video i make that usually around christmas time so that are some of the baked goods we make yep yep okay and jess says can you talk more of your faith now as opposed to the amish faith so i think we kind of talked about that a little bit um i mean our heart is to just follow the the bible as i know it's it can be it can be interpreted differently by different people but um you know is to um i heard someone say once you know be like a rock uh in principle uh but swim with the current on preference so uh i think that's good in the marriage as well as um scripturally so i mean you'll never agree exactly with anybody i mean my wife and i don't agree on everything so you have a choice you can disagree or you can just those things that you are fixed in your heart you can walk in that and give lots of leeway to the other people that's what we have to do otherwise you can't be community uh you can't walk together you can't go to church together because you disagree uh so we just tend to have lots of grace for the other people at least try yeah their very best have lots of grace and and to overlook the things that we know that we can't agree on completely and the main thing is the main thing and that's the lord and keep our eyes on him yes and charlene i think that's how you say it um how did you get to the conclusion it's okay not to wear any sort of head covering no offense meant in this question um tell them how you already talked about that in a previous video yes i already talked about this in it was our first question and answer actually our only question and answer so far and we did it back in the spring so uh i pretty much answered it there so you can go back and watch that should we even try anything i think that's just go back and watch that because we're running out of time yeah yeah okay i think that's actually going that might be about it okay here's nancy asks will you allow your children to further their education after eighth grade so the answer is yes if our children want to they can um yeah the short answer is yes i guess that they can't they want to yes it just depends on what they really want to do right yeah personally this is just our personal um belief or belief isn't the word really but what's the word conclusion or conviction that we would rather that our children if they want to become let's say an eye doctor or heart surgeon or something then go to college but but to me personally it's a waste of time for them to go past the eighth grade to just do random things i would rather that they actually start a business and that they produce and and that's what they actually it's just how you train your children there's no problem if you know i know a lot of you probably most of you have college educations or or higher education no no problem no problem the only thing i've seen in the amish are very industrious people and most of them tend to be most of them tend to be financially well set because when they are done with eighth grade they actually start producing and and when you produce it actually brings results so a lot of them you know either start a business or um or do something of that nature or actually start working on the family farm or family business and so the amish tend to be overall i think tend to be financially well said it's the case with um there's always cases that are not there's many that struggle financially i know that but i think as a general rule uh they're non-being industrious people and therefore typically have no need of financial assistance from the government or basically there's no financial assistance from the government for the amish people at all so they take care of themselves and that so all right i think hey that wraps it up huh yeah i'm sorry i know we didn't quite answer every one of you guys questions but i hope you can understand so we we did our best we got most of them yeah we did we did get most of them okay watch some of the upcoming things that we're doing um talk about our video that's coming out we mentioned that at the beginning yeah right we're editing the video so look for that around this time a special video to us anyways that is coming out around christmas time i hope you're going to enjoy that yes and yeah we're just going to continue to do videos of our lives and our family and just our daily things that we do so we're going to have some christmas videos coming up like some kind of yep so awesome thank you so much for subscribing to our channel we appreciate it our channel is really growing and we know it's because of you it's not because of us so we can't do anything about except put up videos so thank you for sharing uh sharing our videos with others and friends and and commenting and and just being a part of it so it would be lovely to meet all of you and tell you what if you know christ one day we will meet in him and so we look forward to that day but until then if i don't see you god bless you and we'll see on the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Montana Haven

Views: 22,201

Rating: 4.9728584 out of 5

Keywords: Miller, Joas, Amish, Farm, Family, Homestead, Montana, Montana Homestead, Homesteading, Question and answer

Id: oYu-_Oaf8v0

Length: 36min 50sec (2210 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020