Family Economics on the Farm and Homestead

We live in an age where the family is viewed primarily as a unit of consumption. Families consume entertainment together, take vacations together, eat out together, and buy gifts for each other on birthdays and holidays. And these are great things to do together. But historically and biblically families were also productive and worked together to create valuable products and services through family households, homesteads, businesses and farms. Families that worked together with a common desire to serve others had unity and were at the foundation of healthy economies. 

For many of us one of the attractions of agriculture is the ability to do meaningful work together with the people that we love most in life: our family.  Fewer and fewer jobs today allow for the participation of multiple ages and generations and agriculture is a space particularly suited for building and investing in relationships. And while this is the intention for many of us, the reality of learning to do this on a daily basis while coming from a culture of fragmentation, efficiency, and production can be challenging.

In this episode I speak with Rory Groves, author of the book Durable Trades, about the blessing and challenge of learning to be productive families that work as a team as we learn to listen to and follow Jesus together.

Rory's Book Durable Trades: https://a.co/d/8uENOz3

Upcoming Agricultural and Discipleship Training: https://redeemingthedirt.com/training/

Lamplighter Guild Horticulture Course: https://themastersguild.net/summerguild

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, this is Noah Sanders with Redeeming the Dirt, and today I am super excited to share with you an interview I did a little while ago with Rory Groves about family economics and working together as a family. And I hope that you enjoy it. First, though, I wanted to share with you about a few training events that are coming up. If you're interested in learning some about how to approach farming or gardening God's way and use that to make disciples of others, then we have a few opportunities coming up. First of all, in July, which is just next month, coming up very soon, the 9th through the 14th, I'm going to be teaching a horticulture course at the Lamplighter Guild in Mount Morris, New York. And especially, it's for all ages, but especially if you have a young person that is interested in agriculture and in how to build God's kingdom and impact others and reach out to your community through excellence in growing food and in loving others. And you want an amazing experience of discipleship and community with people from all over the country that are interested in using the arts and the crafts to bring glory to God, then the Lamplighter Guild is an amazing experience. I've taught there for many years now and am so excited to have that opportunity. So there is a link in the show notes here to the Lamplighter Guild, and you can check that out or just look up the Lamplighter Guild, which is I believe it is at Lamplighter.net, and there should be a link to that. But yeah, I'll be teaching a horticulture course there again, July 9th through 14th here, 2023. And then we have our training for trainers that's coming up this fall. We kind of have a spring season and a fall season. We did our trainings in March and offered them in April and May as well. And we finished those, and then our fall dates are going to be in September, October, and November. And those will be September 4th through 8th, October 9th through 13th, and November 6th through 10th. And this is where we have a small group of people, five to 10 at a time, on our farm, and we go in-depth for a week on how to think about agriculture as a Christian, how to what are the basic foundational principles of agriculture to get people started growing their own food and how to use that to share with others both the skill of growing food and how to shine the light and the hope of Jesus in our community. So whether you're a homesteader or gardener or beginner or somebody that's in missions, this is a great opportunity to really get a deep dive and some discipleship in this area, hands-on training and follow-up as well with your group. So go to redeemingthedirt.com/slash training to check that out, or there should be some things on the main homepage at redeemingthedirt.com, and there should be some links in the show notes as well. So without any further ado, I would love to get into this interview with Rory Groves as we talk about the exciting topic of family economy. Welcome to the Redeeming the Dirt Podcast. This is Noah Sanders, and I am excited today to talk about the concept of families working together. As we, a lot of us are interested in agriculture, homesteading, gardening, uh, the lifestyle aspect of being able to do it with our families, working together with people that we love. Um, and for me, especially the idea of being able to include my kids in some of the things that we do has been always a big attraction of this kind of lifestyle. Uh, but it's it's not a very um common experience for us to be able to work together doing productive things as a family in our culture in general. And it can be uh there can be different challenges with that, different opportunities. And yet I think there's there's so much value in it uh that it's something that we really need to learn how to do well and learn how to think about how God thinks about that. Because um, if you look at the scriptures, God very much has instituted the structure of the family to be a means of discipleship, means of ministry, a very uh integral uh unit of the church, the household. And uh it's so easy in our culture nowadays to just view everybody as individuals. Even in the church, we tend to do that. And especially in our industrial modern society, the family is no longer uh an economic unit. And farming, it's been an area in which it's kind of lingered around for a little bit longer, but even that's kind of um going away. And so I think it's something that uh we need to know is this something God cares about and what can we do to promote and um yeah, and play our part in kind of rediscovering and uh in promoting that if it's something that God cares about. And so today uh with us to talk about this is uh Rory Groves, and he is the author of a book, Durable Trades, that talks a bit about some of this stuff. And so we're gonna hear a little bit about him and his family and ministry and get hopefully get some encouragement about this topic today. So, Rory, thanks for uh joining us today. Oh, you're very welcome. Grateful to be with you here, Noah. And am I saying your first name correctly there? Yeah, sounds good enough to me. Okay, yeah, we our our farms name here is Aura Valley Farms after uh Waldensian Valley in northern Italy. And uh sometimes people are like Rora, what? You know, how do you pronounce that? So I I love that. So yeah, so uh tell us um the audience uh a little bit about yourself and your family and kind of what what you what do y'all have going on there?

SPEAKER_02 6:18

Yeah, so uh we live on um a little acreage in southern Minnesota. Um my wife and I have been married 17 years. Uh we have six kids from ages 12 down to uh well a six-month-old. So we just recently recently added to the flock here. And um we moved out here. So so background for me, I was uh I've been in uh computers my entire career. Um I'm 45 years old. I started you know into dabbling in computers as a little kid, and I really never um thought I'd do anything different. Uh, have a computer science degree, uh, worked in the field, been self-employed, been a technology consultant, and a number of different uh um tech ventures uh that I have been a part of, some successful, most were not. But uh that it was just completely my world. And so um we uh about 10 years ago, we moved out to a little acreage. Um, I had the opportunity because I was working remote at the time to be a little further away from the city, but we were neither of my wife and I had any experience in homesteading whatsoever. I mean, we are complete greenies at this, and I don't mean like the green thumb greenies. I mean we are starting at the bottom and trying to figure all this stuff out, and uh, you know, so it was interesting because um we we kind of viewed this as a hobby farm when we got out here, and just over the years, we like you were saying, we saw all these opportunities to bring our kids into the work that we were doing. And again, it was still not really, we weren't mindful of it like we were gonna be professional farmers. It just was there's so many opportunities to bring the kids in. Uh, you know, first we started out with chickens, and then uh those are, I mean, so much fun. I you got to start with chickens. If you're gonna go anything, even if you don't have a farm, just figure it out. Don't ask your neighbors, just get the chickens and have a good time with it. Um, but uh, you know, the kids can be super involved in that. They can feed them, they can water them, they can collect the eggs, and there's things like that all over a farm type of a setting or at least a homesteader mindset. We have friends, I should mention, you know, we have friends living on half an acre that produce more food than uh most people uh would buy, you know, all year. They they they can do intensive uh farming and they uh or intensive gardening, I should say. Um, but it doesn't really matter that you have a ton of land, it's more of your what's your mentality behind it. So that was just one of the things I started to notice over the years uh was uh, you know, hey, this is really interesting. You know, with this kind of a setup, we can actually be more productive and rather than just being a consumer who goes out and buys all our food from a store or orders it on Amazon, uh, you know, things that we need, we can actually start to make things that we need. You know, so I started to view my farm as more of a center of production. And I discovered, uh, in hindsight, after I started to do some reading on this, you know, that's the way that most humans used to live for most of history. I mean, we're talking up until really the Industrial Revolution, most households were an economic unit as you described. The family was the basic economic unit of society, and families worked together to produce the things that they needed. That that was the self-sufficiency. That was how our nation was built. That's how all civilizations were built on self-sufficient families who, and I don't, I mean, I use that term as just the closest approximation. Really, they're community sufficient, right? But just this idea of families pulling together to produce things and where we are today is very unusual. Uh, so the more I started to wade into that and try to understand that, the more I desired for my own life in my own family is is there a way that we can do something, you know, profess that I can do something professionally with my career, with my vocation that would involve my family rather than be completely separated and cut off from them for the majority, you know, of my waking life as I go to my job or visit consultants or program on a little office away from my family. You know, everything that we were doing on the farm, we were doing it together. But then when I was doing it for pay, my family wasn't part of that. So that was the beginning where my heart started to turn to my children, I would say, and I really started to look for a way forward, um, which eventually ended up in me doing some writing about it.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

So, this whole idea of family economics is uh it's not a term that we hear a whole lot. So, if somebody was to say, well, what what do you mean family economics? Is that just like a family business or like how would you define kind of what you're talking about here? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

I mean, in the simplest sense, it's just that a family uh uh a family economy is what I the term I use in the book, is where the family members are all oriented to the same task, which is to produce the things that they need. Rather than everyone being individualized and consuming, you know, other people producing the things. So rather than being dependent on corporations or you know, government or bailouts or institutions, the family tries to be that institution to everyone. They try to bring all the functions of the household under one roof, so to speak. And so the family economy is just the idea, it's really a mentality of we want to work together. We want to have a shared vision, a shared labor towards something where we can become more independent and more self-sufficient together.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah. Well, that's been very much a vision of mine. You know, when I first started with for 13 years, we did a small-scale market garden farm and retail business. And, you know, I remember when I was um in my teens, a lot of older gentlemen had told me, you know, that they were like, hey, we spent all of our time professionally away from our families making money that we would now gladly trade for that time back. And so I was always like, I really would rather work 16 hours a day with my family than eight hours a day, you know, away from them. Uh, so that's kind of been a bit of our experience the entire um, you know, my entire career, uh, which has uh been a blessing because my dad, we worked together, you know, on the weekends, but he also had a computer job. And so I was like, man, I wish we didn't have to stop this every Monday, you know. Uh, but as far as um, what are some of the the opportunities that you feel like you've seen um that this kind of you know, homesteading and and a lot of this stuff is really a lifestyle commitment. And it does come at a cost in terms of you gotta say no to a lot of other things, but what have been some of the biggest blessings and just rewards that you've found from you know taking the time to uh to explore this with your family?

SPEAKER_02 13:13

Uh yeah, great question. The um hands down, there's no question the time together that we have with each other has built relationships more deeply with my sons and daughters, with my wife, with our siblings with each other, uh, because we've chosen to go this route, um, far stronger bonds within the family, far more, far more rich time that we have together, um, far more um experiences than we ever could have had if I was pursuing, you know, maximizing my salary in order to provide um a couple of weeks of vacation a year or a bigger house or more toys or whatever it is. It's really, you know, I think it no, it comes down to this concept of um, is God turning your heart to the children? And are your children turning their hearts to you? Because unless parents and especially fathers take that role seriously, um you're you're not gonna even be able to understand uh the rest of the blessings that you're gonna have. There is sacrifice, but um, you know, what is what is money worth if you don't actually have fulfillment in your life? And so the whole the whole premise of um, you know, why are we working? What is the point of all of the money? What is the point of the retirement? Is it so you can basically host the latter years of your life alone in an elder care facility without any family or friends surrounding? Is that the goal of what you're pursuing? Or is it to be surrounded by people you love and love you back because you spent the years of your life, you leveraged instead of investing in a career or a corporate ladder, you invested that time, invested that um that um energy and resources into time with your children, and so that you had strong relationships as your safety net when you got older. And so, I mean, there's so many ways, but I uh to expand the notion of family economy too, it's not you mentioned like family business, and I think that's why I didn't use the term family business, because that could be one part of a family economy, but you also see you know a lot of wreckage around family businesses too, and and where there it's more that you're just using free labor to to monetize and so a lot of kids will might grow up in that environment and say, I want nothing to do with that. Well, you have to really ask yourself, was it actually a family economy? Was your father discipling you, mentoring you, apprenticing you? Was he preparing you for life in the world through that? Was the goal of the family moving in the same direction? You know, there's things like home education, we homeschool all our kids. That is a fundamental component of um a family economy because you're bringing a function back in the household, which again, all throughout history, used to be a home-based um uh activity, uh, a function. So it wasn't really until the late 1800s, only about a hundred years ago, maybe give or take, 150 years ago, where the concept of the state-run school came in displaced the family as a primary educator of children. And you know, we can see where that's led to today, where the state is trying to determine they're trying to be the surrogate parents for everybody. So there's all kinds of these things. When we split apart the family, we're really breaking, you know, God says, uh uh, you know, when he joins men and women and holy matrimony, he says, what God has joined together, let not man separate. And if you trans, you know, transfer that onto the entirety of the family, not just the husband and wife, but the offspring of the husband and wife, what are we doing by trying to separate what God has joined together? He has designed us from the earliest days, Adam and Eve in the garden. He joined them together to share a common purpose. And so there's a blessing that comes over that that involves not just working together, but also worshiping together, educating together, caring for young children in the home, caring for elderly parents in the home, um, you know, being productive and trying to produce rather than just consume. Uh, it's a multifaceted approach, but it really once you once you sync up and have a vision with your family, um, you know, it's just worth the sacrifices that you make are really not even worth talking about compared to the blessed life that you can experience.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Yeah. And I think that's when we as Christians look at what God's called us to do, and we look at our role, which is really to, you know, be completely surrendered to him and to recognize that everything that we could give up that we would rather do than what he told us to do is just a lie, anyways, and what he has is always better, then we have to kind of start with that if we want to tag on, you know, a blessing God has for us in addition to what the world has for us and have our cake and eat it too is is challenge, you know, is a bit challenging. My cousin and I have been talking least recently because you know our families have chosen to make certain lifestyle choices because we want to be uh we want to live a uh a productive life. And I think you know, to help people understand the way that I think about this, and I think that you think about this, is you know, productivity today uh is so much related to people's jobs. And, you know, so you go to work and you work, and then when you're off work, then you consume, and that's what all your free time is always spent is where can I consume something else? Where can I consume some more information? Where can I consume some more entertainment? Where can I consume some more food? Where can I consume some more? And it's and you're a con everybody's a connoisseur of consumption, you know, where can you find the best, whatever? And we've kind of missed the whole idea that the greatest joys in life often come from having produced something, not just when we were getting paid to do it, not just when we were putting in our hours or on the clock, but in our free time, free, you know, like not just when we're in that segregated space of working, but when we're, you know, just throughout the day, that is something that used to be the way people thought and lived all the time was that whole idea of just being productive and working together. And so that's where as we are um approaching, like as we look at our lives and what the way we're trying to organize it, in order what when we're trading, when we want to be productive and we want to we want to actually do things ourselves with our hands. I mean, I really want to go down to the creek and cut some willows and make some baskets, man. I mean, that is like so cool to me. I mean, we are making we got our milk cow now, and so we're like make our own cheese and make our own butter, and and I I love I love just like I just love making things, but you know what that takes? It takes time, yes, and so it means if I I cannot say yes to participating in the lifestyle of everyone around me in the same way that I could otherwise, and that's where the cost comes in play, if that makes sense. It's more like you know, whether it's family events or community events of of that are a little more consumptive. Hey, we're gonna go and rent this place and do all the, you know, like, or we're gonna buy all these gifts for each other and stuff. And I'm like, if I participate in these gift exchanges, I'm gonna be spending more money than I did in my entire family, you know, just for a couple, and and so that's where the rubber meets the road of recognizing like you you are really taking a separate path. It's a worthwhile one, but we have to count the cost not so much in like, oh, we may be fine with it, but there's a degree of separate separateness and cost of other things that we could do and participate in that we I think I'm learning as a leader to just be like, well, let me I I need to be honest with what God's calling me to lead our family in and just go with it, you know, and just lead in it and not try to like make everybody else happy at the same time. Yeah. So it that that's some of the the the interesting challenge, especially when your kids are like, well, why don't we do all these things that everybody else does, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

No, I and I think it's really important to highlight this fact. We live uh deeply embedded inside of very individualist mindset culture, uh, very, you know, even hedonist, that um the the almost the entirety of the human existence is is predicated on uh the fulfillment of personal desire. And so uh, you know, Christians, we're we're caught up in a lot of these things too, where um there's all kinds of systems and and and activities, even in the church, or maybe even especially in the church, that are consumed, that are designed to consume time because basically the fair. The uh the family is separated and somebody needs to do something with the kids. You know, because they've broken apart the family, it's almost like there's like some kind of nuclear reaction here where they've split apart the family. Well, now we got this bomb going off. What are we going to do with all the, you know, the attention span of all these children? They're not engaged in productive labor anymore, as had been for 5,000 years. So there's all of these activities, all of these sporting activities, all of these community activities, all these different ways to kind of occupy the family that just simply would not have existed, even 50, 60 years ago, because the family actually had to be, they had to all pull together around the same goal if they were uh going to just have a life for themselves, especially if you're farming. I mean, anybody who is on a farm who does have a dairy cow or does have we have milking goats, but we, you know, we have enough animals where it's uh it's a big deal for us to leave the farm. No, it's not impossible, but it's just it's more of a consideration than we live than when we lived, say, in an apartment in the city, right? Well, but that's because we're becoming productive again. We're we're exchanging a lot of the superfluous activities with very intentional time together, and we're building very deep relationships with our children, and especially a big one to me is children, uh, our sibling uh relationships. So our, you know, that my my son and daughters have good, strong friendships. We're not gonna be around forever. Mom and dad aren't gonna probably be here as long as they are. So it matters to me that they have each other when we're no longer here. And the way to do that, we only have a little window of time here on earth where we can inculcate these values to our children. One of those ways is time together. And look at all of the ways that children are separated from each other. Uh, they're put in age-segregated, peer-based classrooms uh in church. This happens very frequently too. It's age segregated. Um, so they're getting, you know, religious instruction, uh, even our entertainment, you mentioned entertainment before, oftentimes uh they're all watching television in separate rooms because there's different media that's designed for different age groups. And so you'll see a family that's even home together, but they're in different rooms watching different shows or on their phones or whatever it may be. But this whole idea of age segregating is really destructive, I think. We need to have intergenerational mentorship going on all the time. Adults need to be raising children, children shouldn't be raising each other. So um, these are just other artifacts of the culture that we find ourselves in. And I completely agree, it is a cost to opt out of this culture is a cost. You're there's gonna be a social stigma surrounding it. But you ultimately have to come down on the side of what's best for my family. I mean, who you're ultimately accountable for, especially fathers, is you will stand before God and you will give an accounting of how you raised your children in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and also how you um uh uh discipled each member of your family, including your own wife. Did you lead family worship? Did you bring them before the presence of God daily? You know, you have these opportunities. So let's not lose out on some of this most fundamental stuff that truly is transformational, truly will bring the fulfillment and the meaning that you're trying to search out for with entertainment and purchasing and all of the consumptive type of activities. It's right there, it's right in front of us. We just have to avail ourselves of it.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

I think uh we've been looking at uh just that concept where God's been bringing the concept of community to us more recently, like what is Christian community look like? And obviously, you know, family is built-in community as like the first that building block of community. And one of the things we've just seen over and over again is how important being like just gathering is important to have community, but also not just doing social things together, doing productive things together is bonding and creates community in a way that you just don't get. And like you were saying, when you go on a vacation, I mean that's it's great. We love you know taking times of refreshing as a family in different ways, but it's it's what we it's being able to do things together, this the things that we accomplish together, uh, that is really what um builds that really deep relationship that then you celebrate and you appreciate when you go on a vacation together. And there's so many elements of what God calls us to in disciple making, you know, in just our everyday living, that in the way that we approach things in our culture today, where it's all segregated and all everything's a separate item on the to-do list, it's like there's no way I'm gonna get it all done. And it's because it really wasn't intended to be separate things on the to-do list. It was something that was meant more to be what I like to say is a lifestyle, where uh there was a study done, a secular study done um years ago, uh talking, I think it was called the the blue zones, where they were looking at different uh places around the world, National Geographic, where people live to be really old and healthy. And they found that there were common denominators like community and faith and you know, like certain diet and exercise and all these things. But they said the interesting element, whether it was in Greece or in you know uh Japan or wherever these communities were, was that nobody did these healthy things intentionally necessarily. It was just the way they did things. And so it was that they they their community was set up so that they walked places and they did things together, so they never had to decide to exercise, they didn't decide to go spend time with family, they didn't decide to like eat healthy versus not eat healthy, it was just the context in which they lived, and I think that's you know, it is we do live in a world where we have to buck against, you know, paddle against the stream and go against the tide. But I think in our families, uh that uh finding ways to establish lifestyles where our daily lives are about the things that God cares about, about redeeming the time and creating things of value um with each other is uh seems so much more in line with what God intended and so much more doable.

SPEAKER_02 28:43

Yeah, uh well, well put. And it's something community has been something that's been on our minds and hearts for a long time, and we're part of part of a house church and trying to pursue more intentional community together, and it is, it's against the grain. It's um it makes me think of when you're sharing that this concept of taking dominion, which is right there in Genesis, and why you know, why is it that we aren't ultimately fulfilled by consumption, right? By the consuming, you know, if shopping is just a very short-term psychological uh gimmick to uh to get us through the day, um, but it's not really producing the the accumulation of stuff is not really producing a deep fulfillment in society. Uh and so could it be all linked back to this concept of taking dominion that God has wired us to be productive? And that is actually through that being productive. I and I again, I don't I don't mean uh it to be something about like just putting more hours in at the office, but I mean uh productive in a way that we're doing things together. We're building, like you said, the foundation of the family. The Adam couldn't do it alone, right? Adam was not an individualist, right? Uh he needed Eve in order to complete his work and to have a help meet. And then the children came from that union. So there's very definitely God demonstrates the building block of community in the family. And the next logical step to that is community, a community of families or a family of families that are all um ordered before the Lord uh and pursuing life together. I mean, I you you you it's very hard to get away from that concept. You you go to the book of Acts. How did the church behave when they were first uh on the day of Pentecost and the the the days following the days of Pentecost is they were together, they were breaking bread in each other's homes daily. Um, what does Jesus talk about uh you know before he's being led to his own crucifixion? He's he's talking about he's praying with the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking that we may be one, as he and the Father is one. You have the body of Christ. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12, you know, all the diversity, but they all make up one body, and no one part is more important than another part. Everything about the New Testament model of the church is Christians living in community, and and we're a we're a far cry from that now. And so it's difficult to know. I don't know what the exact answer is to that. It's an uphill battle, like you said, but I think and I hope that if we are diligent, just like with our own families in trying to pursue intentional community and trying to pursue a oneness of heart and vision with other families, even, you know, even working together, like you said, that that is something I'd definitely recommend for any church out there. Uh, some way, you know, plant a community garden or maybe you know, doing some building together. I have at our last church, I know that there were um folks that are part of that church that go back to when the building was first built long before we were ever arrived. And uh they still talk about those days when they were putting on the roof, when they were on the raptors, when you know, when they were building the building, has it had such staying power beyond the transience of people who came after them. And so, yeah, I don't know exactly what it is or how God set it up that way, but it certainly to me seems like it should be an objective for every family that after they're pursuing time together and economy in their own family, that they're trying to build a community economy with like-minded families.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Yeah. And I think because it's I've been in this space for for a while, just personally, I think I've also seen how it's, you know, you have these building blocks that God's given of his body and his church, where you have our you know, individual faith and walk with the Lord, and then us as our as families, and then like as families of flame families, like the local church and so on and so forth. And uh, and I think it's so important to recognize that all of these are opportunities to apply the gospel, opportunities to see it manifested and to display that to the world where it's like messy, broken people where Jesus is helping us, you know, and and just like traditions can be helpful or you know, means of grace that God can give us is is helpful, they themselves, by themselves apart from Christ, are not a solution. Um, and I've seen uh especially when you you know the nice thing about our well, like the nice thing from a bad perspective, I guess, about our segregated culture is you can be a pretty messed up person and still get along with people because we all can respect each other's space, we're all in like isolated individual, we can all be selfish separately, and we just don't like you know it we we don't have to the rub on each other as much because we can just live our own individualistic lives. Well, when you dive, I've you know, there's some families that have kind of uh laid a foundation of selfishness in their own personal lives that sometimes they wanna, you know, the dad wants to just fix that and by going and the right starts a homestead and without addressing the heart first, and all it does is it just rips open and exposes all the yuckiness that's there. And that's really God's mercy, right? Like to let us see and not just be fake anymore, but to uh I both recognizing that the beauty of community is it keeps us from being able to hide, which means it can get messy. Yeah. And that's okay because better to like see the mess and let Jesus start dealing with it than to let it like pretend that it doesn't exist there. And if you start coming back and trying to really get involved with your family, if you haven't been, it's also gonna be a bit messy and it's gonna be hard at first, and that's okay. You know, it's not like, oh, this doesn't work. No, that's actually part of the blessing is the realities of real discipleship, not just like showing up for a Bible study and great, but and like 24 hours a day in our lives, you know, raising you from the the very scratch at the beginning is is what really allows the rubber to meet the road, and um we all get changed and transformed in a way that is unlike any other discipleship experience, but we have to recognize that's part of the blessing of it, actually. Amen.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

Yeah, I mean you're describing sanctification, right? And so um God says, Hebrews, he chastises those he loves. Um, that that chastisement sometimes takes the form of other brothers and sisters in the Lord who know how to um point something out in you which you can't quite see yourself. Uh, and hopefully uh they're uh uh you're pointing out something in them and holding them accountable to the word of God. But that in a in a very fractured environment like we have today, it's very difficult to get to the level of relational trust where you can have those conversations. Even pastors, I think, skirt the issue a lot because they just don't feel you know like they know someone well enough or they don't want to disrupt um, they don't want to disrupt the congregation or or call out something that needs to be called out. We actually just did a study, we were in uh uh 2 Thessalonians 3, and um, you know, Paul is quite and John and and Jesus are quite clear about our responsibility to each other to hold each other accountable. And so it's one of those things that you see manifest in a community that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. I liken it to a marriage. So, you know, we can all come up with reasons why we shouldn't be in community because you know, what if we have different personality quirks and we don't want to hang around with each other anymore? We'll just move to another church, right? Well, but like we don't put off the whole institution of marriage because it takes work and because it doesn't always work out, right? I mean, we look at marriage as actually, it's ultimately a sanctifying process for those who are willing to die to their own uh personal ambitions and willing to put someone else ahead of their own interests. It actually produces a better person in you because you're being sanctified through that relationship. And then children come on the scene, and then you're really getting sanctified. But you know, it's worth it in the end because God loves you enough not to leave you where you are. So he uses those those kinds of things. And I and I think, yeah, I mean, to your point, you there's not a um there's not a cure-all in in the family economy. It's not just about changing the scenery or changing a job, although I would say that if you're you can change your job so you have more time with your family, it's gonna make a pretty significant impact. But you do need to address the matters of the heart. I mean, you really need to look at evaluate the whole picture. Where am I? How close to the biblical model of life am I actually living? And how much have I given up to the enemy in terms of uh where my time is being spent, what my ambitions are. And so if a if homesteading is one of the directions the Lord leads you, uh great. I think homesteading is a great way to involve a lot of kids and a lot, um a lot of people in a lot of different ages, like young kids, older kids. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And if you have the option and you have the um kind of the desire, I think you should take it. But there's other ways. And that was kind of the premise of my book. I came up with 60 different vocations that are that are to varying degrees, not all of them, uh, but the to varying degrees are family-centered occupations that historically families had practiced. And there were ways for people to come together around a common vision and provide for their families. And so anything that you can do in that direction, I think will help. But you know, you gotta have time together if you're gonna start building up those bonds.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

Yeah, it's kind of like their uh they provide a canvas upon which, you know, the gospel can be painted. And I realized in my my own journey, there have been seasons where I have that canvas, but I'm expecting it to paint itself, you know, and I realize I'm missing so many opportunities, you know, that I have that I realize, oh, they are just opportunities if I don't actually have some intentionality to ask to listen to the Lord and say, what, what do I need to be doing? How do I need to be paying, you know, investing in my kids better, or what kind of things do we need to spend time on? It doesn't, uh it doesn't always happen by default. And I think that's because there's no there, God wants us to be in that continual humble relationship of listening to Him and uh and walking in that throughout throughout the journey. But I love uh that that concept of the durable trade. So give us some examples of what um, so this is what your book is about. What are some of those trades that are some of your top favorite uh durable trades of history that allowed families to work together?

SPEAKER_02 40:02

Yeah, so um the book, the subtitle is Family Centered Economies That Have Stood the Test of Time. And it was what I what I was discussing earlier about uh wanting to look for ways where I could leave a profession in in um high tech. I just didn't know uh what I would have to do or what options were available to someone like me who wanted to work with his family. I just was out there for on a quest, a personal quest, to try to discover that. And so what I did um is I looked at all of the professions that were around before the industrial revolution. This was a time when virtually the entire populace was self-sufficient. Historians say they were a self-s uh self-sustaining and self-producing communities. Every household was a self-sustaining and self-producing community. So it they they truly were not dependent on the way, on the large corporations, on governments, definitely not the government back then. And they were largely self-sufficient and they worked together. And so I started, I decided to use that as kind of my litmus test. If the trade existed before or the profession existed before, that and it still exists today, that means it survived all kinds of um uh disruption and I mean everything that we see going around today, it's these trades have survived.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

They're durable, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:22

Wars, yeah, depressions, uh, hyperinflation, um, you know, civil wars, all these are all things that have come and gone, and and and not the least of which is technical innovation, which most of the jobs that are around today will be gone in you know a short amount of time, you know, maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years. Most of the jobs that are available today for people getting degrees in college and things like that, they're just gonna be gone. A lot of them are gonna be replaced by computers, one thing. So these are trades. So, you know, yes, for some examples. Well, I mean, there's some typical ones that you might expect in there, like farmers in there, carpenters in there, uh woodworkers in there, and um, but then there's other ones that were kind of surprising when I got into it. Things like uh a jeweler, uh, someone who makes jewelry is actually a pretty resilient, uh long-standing um family-based business. Uh innkeeper, we see the the rise of the Airbnb platforms and people starting to do that. That's a very old historical trade that people used to conduct. Um uh, what are some other ones? Tutor. So some this is one that we're engaged in, is uh basically informal education. You know, if you're involved in either tutoring one-on-one or you're teaching classes or something outside the formal education, there's always special interests that people have. Uh, you mentioned that you know you to you used to do blacksmithing, and there's you know, you can go to trade schools or or um what would you call them, traditional craft schools and learn things like blacksmithing and timber framing and boat building and masonry. You can learn a lot of these things that are traditional crafts. Well, those are all tutors, and that used to that trade used to be around for for, I mean, all the way back pretty much. Uh, so uh those are a couple, uh, what are some other ones? Um, cook, of course, brewer. There are there are family wineries that go back 10 centuries that are still around today in the same family. Um, apothecary, that you know, people used to grow uh medicines right in their own gardens, and that was the town apothecary, and they used to provide that. Uh so uh number number of those. So those are just a uh cherry picking a couple of uh the trades, um, but there's 60 in all, and each one I score it and I rank it according to how feasible they are for families to enter today and how family reinforcing, not all of them, you know, there's certain governmental type positions that have been around forever, and those are not particularly family centric, but uh most of them are, and virtually all of them are more family centric than most of the professions that we see today.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

The uh just the resilience. See a family economy. I was talking to a friend of mine from Zimbabwe, and he was talking about the family farms there, and how just the ability for some of those farms to um to make a profitable business in because of the tenacity of a farm that's run by a family that is willing to hold on, where sometimes there's years where they're down to the beans, man, in the pantry, and they eke through those seasons in order to get to like they finally make it long term. He's like no, you know, like no corporate um farm endeavor would like ever push through that kind of uh profit margin, you know, for those seasons to be able to get there. And so just the resiliency of those of family enterprises is is such a an important part of having you know durable economies. For some people, no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

Yeah, I was gonna mention uh the other thing too is that most families throughout history practice multiple trades, multiple vocations. So you have you know, someone who's uh uh a farmer is also a shepherd, and someone who's a woodworker is also a carpenter. And you would have you know, go back to the founding fathers. You have someone like Ben Franklin who was an inventor and he was a writer and a publisher and a statesman. George Washington was tending uh apple, his apple orchards, right? Um, and Jefferson was a gardener. So there's um all of these um historical examples that I found, they would have three or four or five or six maybe enterprises. And actually, that's common today. If you find some of the um, I've noticed this in the Anabaptist communities, the old order Amish, the Hutterites, um, homestead heritage. You'll see that the families within those um types of more subsistence agrarian lives, they will be engaged in maybe milling wood and huge gardens and breeding horses and making carriages, all within the same family. Maybe though then the and the daughter's a midwife, right? And so that's a typical form of family resilience that you don't have, like when dad goes off and everything depends on this one corporation and and something happens and they downsize, right? I mean, we're heading into recession pretty obviously here in the next, well, if we're not in it already, these are these are real risks. You kind of have all your eggs in one basket, right? And so a family economy, you may not make quite as much, you may not make like one large paycheck, but you might have a little bit coming in from all of these different streams. And then if one of them is, you know, has hits a dry spell, you know, if like for example, like the farm, if if if you're not just dependent on corn and soybeans, you know, then then you have other sources of income that can kind of help offset the the difficult years, which is a natural. That I mean, we should all be prepared for having hard times. So that that's another thing to keep in mind is that you're not like just switching. My am I trading in being a computer? I would, you know, am I gonna stop writing code just to raise you know broiler chickens? I can't see how the numbers work out on that. Right. It's a mind shift because first of all, you're producing as much as you can for yourself, for your own family. Um, and then you're just and then you're reducing your actual family's needs for uh for purchasing. And then you're looking for ways for off-arm input to kind of supplement what you're able to do together with your family.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

You know, I think people too, if you look at the economics of self-production, when no money changes hands, nothing is taxed. So, you know, to to raise to to buy a thousand dollars worth of food, I mean, how much do you have to make to have a thousand dollars left over? Then you can pay taxes on that if your state charges sales tax for that, and then the person selling it's used tax and all that. So I'm like, you know, I was looking at it one time, I'm like, to to grow a thousand dollars worth of food versus buying it, you know, I could probably grow a thousand dollars worth of food for less than a hundred bucks worth of input easy, and I'd have to make like fourteen hundred dollars to buy that thousand dollars worth of food. So I'm saving thirteen hundred dollars growing a thousand dollars worth of food versus buying it, you know. So it's it it's you know, there's that idea of how much of the year are you working for the government, how much are you working for yourself? Well, the only thing they haven't figured out how to tax yet, maybe they will sometimes, so don't say too loud, is like things that you actually produce yourself, you know, like that is that tomato. And uh there's so much freedom in that. And and it also means that the more you do for yourself, the less your expenses are, which means that whatever you do for um on the market at the marketplace to produce the cash that you need, your demand, your your need is much lower. That's how we were able to make a living farming over the years, is I wasn't replacing a normal income. I was just making the I was able to make the cash requirements that I required as a family while having the time to productively produce most of the things that people normally buy that would have cost us a lot of money if we had bought it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

Absolutely. And that we've had the same experience over the years is uh uh my business, my software business started to wind down, and it was a very scary uh time period for me, and I was really trying to figure out what to do. And one of the things that we noticed is that because um uh the income was forcibly reduced, I mean, I wasn't it wasn't my I my goal to reduce my income, but um uh it forced us to become a lot more creative in how we were consuming. And we one of the ways that we dealt with it is we just we focused a lot more on what we were producing on our farm. And we have 10 acres, so it's not like we don't have a huge operation. It's it's uh a wonderful lot for us, but it's not like you know, a thousand acres or anything like we're not we're not farming a huge operation here. We have some goats and sheep and chickens, and we have a large garden and some apples, and and so it's there, it's amazing what we have been able to do just learning to live on less, because we've used the farm as really the source. I mean we even we that wood stove behind me is we you know, we heat with wood as much as we can in wintertime. That comes from our own uh our own trees around here. It's just manual labor. And the other thing that made me think about when you're producing that thousand dollars worth of food, you know, hopefully you're doing it with your family. Right. And that's priceless. Yes. We sit around the table, we've we you know, we're eating pickled beets and we're eating a leg of lamb. I mean, the hilarious thing is like living the subsistence agriculture. I don't this is the dirty little secret, is you you live like kings, honestly. I mean, you eat like kings at least, because we'll have on a random Tuesday night leg of lamb and mashed potatoes with our own potatoes, or um, or we'll have um, you know, uh ham, ham and potato soup, and the broth came from our own chickens and the ham from our own pigs and the potatoes from our own garden, and we're living all the way through uh the winter. And I've been very diligent this winter to say, see, kids, remember when we were working so hard in the garden for all this?

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 51:13

We're still living off the produce of that all you know, four or five months in through the winter. We have potatoes in our basement, we have um uh all kinds of meat in our freezer. There's so many ways that we're taken care of, and so I'm I'm I'm doing a uh a really intentional um uh uh instruction as a father to try to make sure my kids are up to the up to the chore this summer because I want to link the reward with the work because it is very real. If you're going out there and you're not getting you're not leveraging all of the work that you put in, that can be very frustrating. But um, but yeah, it's just a wonderful way to do it. I I wouldn't trade it at for anything, honestly, no matter what the price was. Even if it cost us more to do it on the land, I would rather do it because we do it together.

SPEAKER_00 52:00

Uh to piggyback off what you were talking about with the kids, is there uh any tips you have for families working together with, you know, when you're surrounded by a culture of children participating in consumer activities, having the latest thing, be involved in a lot of that when you're like, well, our family just works all the time. You know, how do you how do you uh make that a positive thing? You know, I'm saying, how do you cast uh an inspiring vision for your children for this lifestyle rather than them just kind of looking at the other side of the fence and being like, but look at all the stuff we don't have and we don't get a do, you know?

SPEAKER_02 52:39

Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting that um the first thing I would say is start them young. Uh as young as possible. You know, kids at the age of three should be starting to contribute somehow in the home economy, um, especially when they're five, six, and seven, you know, make sure that they they're having something that they're responsible for. And this would go no matter where you live, by the way. Uh, but I uh as best as you can, start them as young as possible. And really by the age of eight, they should be involved in some meaningful work in the family economy, meaning like they're doing chores, they're feeding animals, they're doing things that are very essential. Um, it matters to kids to know that they're needed. That was when I talked to Paul Gauchy and interviewed him for the book, he that was one of the things kids know when they're needed, and they know when they're being, you know, kind of shooed at when they're becoming a burden, shooed out of the way and given meaningless chores versus if they're actually helping and you know, and when they know they're needed, when they know they're integral to the family economy, um, it really builds their self-esteem. Uh, they feel they can feel that mom and dad really need me. I'm important around here. You know, what does that do for a seven or eight-year-old kid? It it's it's very significant. And so that would be the first thing is that I getting them involved in meaningful work from an early age, and even if that means you have to slow down, say as a parent, sometimes it's easier to do things yourself, but so important when they're very young. If you can train them when they're young, then the issue of all the competition for screens and video games and other kind of frivolous toys, they just don't really have the power. And the thing, honestly, I would say is um it tends to be a little bit the other way around where uh other kids are looking at our kids and seeing how involved mom and dad are with them and how bonded we are as a family. Um, because it's not always even if the kids have all the toys, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have those deep relationships. And so there is a yearning there for that time together with mom and dad, with brother and sister. I'm not gonna say it's always the easiest thing, but that would be my first tip is to get them, get them started young. And then I would, as a father, I mean, I tell my kids all the time, this is important. Every human generation since Adam has known how to live off the land, except for the last two or three, except for our generation and the one before it, roughly. But if you go back to about the 30s, the Great Depression, whether or not they did live on the land, they knew how to live off the land. And we've lost that. That's an essential human skill. And so they need to know. I said, I'm preparing you for life. I want you to know how to, no matter what you want to do as a profession, you don't have to be a farmer, but I want you to know how to grow your own food. We should not have let that skill escape our grasp. That is essential. So, you know, as parents, you need to set a vision for why this is important. And then uh the third thing I would say is eliminate the competition. You know, we got rid of our television seven years ago because the kids would fight over wanting to watch it. And and it's just not worth it. We just got rid of it. And and we we don't do video games. Um, we do do some extracurricular activities for music and and occasionally we'll do some sport things here and there. But you know, we opt out of a lot of things so that we can have the time together. And I would say that that if you if you're always fighting against the alternative to weeding the guard and being watching something on television, that's gonna be a tough battle to win. So set the you know, set the principle for your kids. Uh, don't give in to some of those time wasters. You only have so many years. Think about it this way like you have maybe 10 years to really get through to your kids, right? I mean, if you haven't gotten through to them by the time they're 10, you're gonna have a very difficult time when they're 15, 16, and 17. So I, you know, I highly encourage parents to get as invest in their kids as much as they can as early as they can, and just set that trajectory. I don't think you're gonna feel like you're missing out on anything. And then especially as they get older and they can take on more and more tasks around the homestead or in the family business, then you really start to see the rewards coming in in many different ways.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

Yeah, I think it sounds like as well. Um, I'd like to hear a little bit in just a second about your family's ministry and kind of what y'all have been doing. Because for for us as a family, we found that you know, having like family economy and all these like doing things together and having our homestead is great, but uh there's gotta be a bigger like mission that we're a part of. There's gotta be like it's not just doing things together productively for us, but it's doing things productively as a family so that we can have to share with other people, so that we can invite people in, so we can include people, so we can serve people. And when even just as much as producing together, serving together, you know, when we do our trainings here, we're bringing people in into our home, we're serving them, we're you know, all that. And when we need them, like you said, to be like, we need you to help. Like we can't do this, mom and dad can't by ourselves, like, but we're doing it for these people because God's given us a job as a family um to equip these people, then uh yeah, it just makes makes a huge difference. So tell us a little bit about kind of uh uh some of the resources and and things that y'all are doing uh through your ministry that y'all are a part of and how people can uh connect with you. Certainly.

SPEAKER_02 58:20

Um, you know, a truly biblical Christian household will, by design, by definition, be salt and light. You you can't help it. And one of the things that we noticed was we moved out here, like I said, 10 years ago. And um when we started to really take seriously what God's call was on our family, and by that I mean building a family economy, really bringing, you know, we started home educating our children, we started really focused daily family worship, really taking these things to heart seriously, uh, really trying to steward the land as we felt God had put it on our hearts to do this. Uh, we saw that um we couldn't keep people away. I mean, it's like I mean, they were crawling out of the woodwork to want to come and visit our farm and learn more about this. And what are you doing? And there was not actually an evangelical uh effort, like concerted effort. It just was evangelism. And people would come and they would uh a lot of them would be, you know, very uh inspired uh by what they saw. And all we were doing was just living our lives. And um, and so anyway, that's one of the things I would say is when you lock in with the order and the design that God has for you, a complete be, you know, the relationship with God, man, and creation, it is a bright testimony to the world. You cannot hide it. You know, it's it's it's a city on a hill, and people will find you. Um, one of the things that we did in over the years uh was we would just start hosting events. We'd have a maple syrup tree tapping party and invite friends and neighbors who ever wanted to come out, or we would do um uh we did interns one summer and we had some some uh fine folks come out and kind of help us build chicken tractors and and learn about raising animals. Um and we've done a number of other events, homesteaded homesteading beekeeping workshops and different kinds of things where we just always had this. Is just my wife and I own our own desire was to share what we were learning because again, we weren't the experts. We were learning and we just thought it was a lot of fun. And so um, what we did ended up doing is uh a little over a year ago, we started a ministry because, like you had been saying earlier, it wasn't just about the skill, but it's really about the faith behind the skills. Why are we doing what we're doing? We don't want to just pass on homesteading skills, and there's there's a lot of value in that, and there's a lot of really wonderful resources out there to learn about homesteading. We were really feeling called to help families who wanted to build a family-centered home, a family-centered economy. How can we help them using homesteading and other types of activities to encourage and inspire them? So we started a ministry called Gather and Grow. And the entire purpose is just this is to rebuild the family economy. Um, we publish a quarterly newsletter, we host events on our farm. Uh, in fact, we have a maple syrup uh workshop coming up this weekend. Finally, the stuff is starting to flow. Yeah, there you go. And so we'll have a we'll have about a dozen families or so come out and uh we'll learn about tree tapping, then we'll go up uh stairs in the barn loft and we'll have a pancake feed and potluck. And so um, but the whole point here again is we have multiple events throughout the year and we want to encourage families who are trying to do this. You know, this it's against the grain, and it's certainly a remnant of society who are thinking in this way. But if you are thinking that way, we are here because we want to encourage you and we want to bless you. And we have some audio resources you can find on the website. Uh, some of them are free and they're very other ones are very inexpensive. Um, we have, of course, my book, Durable Trades, and um we travel around to uh some degree, can't leave the farm too often, but a couple times a year we leave uh to go do some speaking gigs around the country as well. So we have a couple of meetups. Uh actually one of them is coming up in uh Tennessee in April. So I don't know if any of your listeners are in the Tennessee area, but love to see them.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:16

Yeah, we do have quite a few friends in the Tennessee area. So will they be able to find out about that on your website then?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:23

Okay, so sorry, I forgot. Uh yeah, gatherandgrow.us is where you can go and find all the resources and learn more about what we're doing here. Uh and yes, uh it's a uh some of the events are free, some of them are are just coming RSVP. And so if you go to the site, you'll see events that are coming up and you'll see a newsletter sign up. You can sign up and get that. That's probably the best way is we we keep as much information to uh encourage families through that newsletter as we can. Uh, and that's just something that our own family puts together every it started out as our own little family newsletter and it kind of ballooned into something uh bigger. So we're really excited about that. And it's a way to help connect with other families who are thinking the same thing in your area. So if you come out to one of the regional events, you'll meet a lot of folks who are um interested in building family economies and and they are looking for other folks, you know. Perhaps it could be a start of a new community for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:18

That is awesome. And what's the best place that they can uh find your book? Um I saw that it was on Amazon. Are there any other sure places you'd like them to go?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:26

Yeah, uh, we sell it directly from our website. If you go to gatherandgrow.us, you can buy direct from us. Uh that we sell it for 20 bucks plus shipping. Uh and uh, or yeah, you can get anywhere books are sold. So it's pretty wide distributed distribution.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:41

Well, I hope this uh has been encouragement to uh some of the people listening. I know it's been a real encouragement to me uh just to be able to be encouraged about what God calls us to in this and the opportunities and really just the idea of of uh getting a a bit of a feel for the fact that God seems to be moving in people's hearts around the country. You know, it's a God thing, it's not just uh you know something that anybody decided to do, it's just things that God's put on different people's hearts. And I don't, I'm sure you're the same way, but I, you know, all this stuff is is cool and I love it. If God told me to do something else tomorrow, I want to be for that, you know. So I just want to be wherever He is. But it's exciting to be in the space of agriculture and homesteading because God seems to be moving, He seems to be putting people in this space that have more of a motive than just self-preservation, they have uh a much bigger uh eternal um heart in what they're doing. And uh I know that uh excited to see what kind of fruit um comes in the future because of that. So I'd love to, as we close, um if you have any uh final thoughts for our audience, and then I'm gonna ask you to just close with prayer for them and in their journey in this.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:00

Yeah, I would love to. Um what I would say is that to the uh parents or the husband or someone who says, like, yeah, I'd love that. That sounds great, but I don't know, I don't see any possible way to get there. That's probably you know one of the most common questions I get is how do you actually pull something like that off? And um what I would say is that I what I tell them is I don't know because what what worked for me probably isn't gonna work for you or might not work for you. But I know that if you have this vision on your heart, God put it there and he has a way out. And so what I would tell every one of you out there is first start on your knees. Yeah, go to God and seek a vision for your family. He he put that there, he has a plan for you, and then pray that he would part the seas. And let us pray with you, by the way. If you come and sign up for our newsletter, there's a little box in there where you can tell us what your prayer requests are. We get a prayer. Requests every day from all over the country. People are in the same boat. They don't know how to cross this sea. And so we say, we're going to pray with you. We don't know either, but we're going to pray with you that God will meet your vision that He's given you. So that's where I would tell you to start and then take the first step. You probably don't know how to get to the other side, but you probably know of one thing that you can do today. And then see if God doesn't make a way for you and provide you with the next step and the next step and the next step. We have seen it in our ministry countless times. People have found land, they have found a new career. They have found there's so many testimonials that I could share of God answering these prayers if the father's hearts will turn to their children.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:47

Awesome. Well, for these people listening that are wrestling with some of these very things and have that desire to trust the Lord in that way and or just want to seek him more, I would love for you to pray for them now, even as uh as they're thinking about these things. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

Dear Heavenly Father, God, I just right now, you know, everyone who's listening to this message, you know what's on their hearts, and you know the cry of their hearts. Even if they don't express it in words, they have it there. And you have caused their hearts to beat, you have caused their hearts to turn towards their children, towards their families, and you're causing their children's hearts to turn towards them. Lord, would you please inspire with a vision and a clarity now on what that first step is? Maybe it's a new job transfer, maybe it's a homestead move, maybe it's just carving out more time together by saying no to the world's attractions. Father, you know what the right step is to bring those homes together and bring those families together. And I pray that you would now honor their first steps and that you would make a way for them and eventually to get across what seems impossible. You are the God of the impossible, and you have done it so many times. So we stand by these families, we lift them up, and we ask that you would hear their prayers in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:15

Well, thank you, Rory, so much for sharing today. And thanks everyone for listening. Until next time, this is Noah Sanders encouraging you to be faithful, to be humble, and to keep redeeming the dirt. God bless.