The Ohana Adventure
The Ohana Adventure
WE ARE DONE! When More isn't More!
What if finding balance in life meant moving halfway across the world? Our journey from the fast-paced hustle of YouTube fame to the serene landscapes of Scotland has been nothing short of transformative. We kick off Season 4 of Raising Ohana by sharing personal stories from our whirlwind collaborations with household names like Disney and Lego, and the toll that lifestyle took on our health. Hear how the pandemic brought an unexpected pause, forcing us to reevaluate our priorities and embrace a slower, more meaningful pace focused on family and well-being.
Ever felt like chasing success was leading you down a path of burnout? Our 2019 was a rollercoaster year, filled with the excitement of working with Nickelodeon but also immense stress and personal struggles. Therapy helped us navigate the chaos, and our Christian faith offered a guiding light towards service and family. Listen as we recount our spiritual journey, which inspired us to engage in service missions and make a bold move to Scotland. This decision was fraught with its own challenges but taught us invaluable lessons about resilience, faith, and the joy of simplifying life.
While it may seem like abundance is the key to happiness, our experiences taught us otherwise. True fulfillment often lies in small acts of kindness and nurturing meaningful relationships rather than accumulating material wealth. Join us as we explore the joys and struggles of adapting to life abroad, highlighting how even simple gestures can enrich our lives and those around us. We also invite you to engage with us across various platforms as we continue to build a supportive and inspiring community. Let's walk this journey of growth and discovery together.
Formatted. It is empty. There we go, it's recording.
Speaker 2:Here we go.
Speaker 1:All right, welcome back to Raising Ohana. I'm Rachel.
Speaker 2:I'm Jace and this is season four.
Speaker 1:That's right. Episode one so excited we have, if you've seen it, a new space.
Speaker 2:It is a work in progress. We are working on it. It's getting closer. But you know what's so cool is, last time we thought we were starting this whole big season, everything was epic. We were going crazy and we got three episodes done, and then what did we do?
Speaker 1:Nothing no.
Speaker 2:See Okay. That is actually a perfect example of how we see things. I see like growth and opportunity and she's like whatever, I'm always looking for growth and opportunity. We moved out of the country.
Speaker 1:We did move out of the country and we slowed life down.
Speaker 2:So we'll tell you what happened, but not yet. Let's get into why we slowed life down. So because we were done. I'm Jace, I'm crazy, I'm active, I see lots of opportunity, I move forward with things. This is Rachel. She has six children. We share these six children, but she birthed them and I was just there to support. I didn't do a very good job, but I was there to support, but she also sees opportunity and charges and gets it and does it, and so yes, that's what we were doing Going, going, going.
Speaker 2:How many YouTube channels did we have in 2023, which was when our last episode was filmed, january 2023.?
Speaker 1:Probably eight, which was scaled down from 10.
Speaker 2:Right. So we had all these YouTube channels going. We were chasing the dream, we were helping our kids. They were making money. We were making money, we were having opportunities. What let's see in 2023.? Nope, because January is when we decided. In 2022, we filmed for what kind of brands? Actually, any of those couple years right there, that were just madness.
Speaker 1:We're going to go back even farther, 2018, we hit some real big growth on our YouTube channel, the Ahana Adventure. Loved it, it was awesome. 2019 was out of control. This is where things got so crazy. We were filming for Disney. What was it? Blue studios, lego, nestle, nestle. We were filming for um like viral nation, which had like many um like it was an agency.
Speaker 1:Everything star wars, every, every movie coming out like sony pictures as well as like oh my gosh, I can't even remember all the things we were doing so many organization like brand deals, where we worked with brands. We featured their products on our youtube channel, which we loved. It was all products we loved or companies that we like to work with.
Speaker 2:We never said yes to ones we didn't and we were filming, except for the diaper one, that one, uh, that was actually. You said no and I said yes.
Speaker 1:That was crazy. That was crazy. We won't get into that, but we were still putting out in 2019, five videos a week. Four to five videos a week Probably. We dialed down to four that year and we were traveling almost every couple every other month. We were putting out so much content and that's the year that, like my health, declined severely.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, you had to go to the ER how many times? Oh, not in 2019. In 2020. In COVID, I went to the ER. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:And that was beyond crazy. But we were going because it was like growth and we were motivated. We were so excited and it was epic. It really was epic. We had these grandiose dreams for our family. Our YouTube channels, all the kids' channels, were pumping out content so much.
Speaker 2:Now I'm going to rewind even farther. We first got married. It's really far. You worked at a bagel shop. I was doing mortgages and some real estate. We were super broke. Then we opened up a little video store, then a scrapbooking store. Clay was sitting in the little bouncer. You were sitting there or you were nursing her with customers in our store. I would go throw net fishing just north of laie point on the north shore of oahu, literally to bring fish so that we had meat, because we honestly strapped.
Speaker 1:We were like constantly strapped we couldn't even afford 15 years. I mean like Jason real estate in Hawaii, which was epic. But not very often do these big, huge deals close that would pay for six months of our life, before have to pay for three to six months of our life in the future because we were like stretching the dollar as far as we could.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:And I mean we were happy, though I mean we were plugging along and doing all the things.
Speaker 2:So that is a point. It was simple. Yes, we had a hard time paying our bills, but we would just walk down the street from our house and play at the beach, and it was free.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to say, like life in Hawaii, everyone's in the same boat. You're all just different levels of poor, right? Like it's just really, really true. The majority of the people, we all live in this like kind of semi-poor life, and then there's extremely wealthy, but there's in Hawaii, the majority all do the same same thing. We all go to the beach, we all surf, we all play in the water, we all like play in the water.
Speaker 1:Explain play in the water for me I sit there and watch the baby skies I did get in the water a lot, I love the warmth of hawaii. But we, I saw that, I saw that wink what was that? I thought only the camera saw that, oh my gosh, whatever. But what I thought? Only the camera saw that wink, oh my gosh, whatever. But what we're saying is it is the entertainment is free, the people are wonderful, humble people, everyone's kind of in that same boat and we all like just kind of plug along.
Speaker 2:It was great. Okay, so the reason for that rewind was that we were so broke and we were willing to work so hard, but then fast forward from 2009 to 2019, we were still broke in our minds.
Speaker 1:It's true, Once you live in a certain mentality for a long time whether that's like a nine to five job going to be changing to an entrepreneur, that's a hard mindset change as well. But going from not having a lot of finances really like stretching the budget, making sure we can just pay for groceries, we can pay our bills, we can maybe have enough money to like which final notice do you pay first?
Speaker 2:Right, that's where we were at, literally. Which final notice? Like this, one's red ink is more red than the rest, so we've got to pay this more. Are they gonna kick us out? Actually gonna turn right?
Speaker 1:yes, and that was for how many years? 15, 15 years of like good job, honey. And then we finally get into um, where we can save money. When we started growing youtube, we were able to pay off some of our debts that we had acquired from all these businesses and starting to pay off anything that we had debt-wise and starting to have a savings account and starting to grow that. But still I felt this is me, it's probably not Jace I felt broke constantly still, because I'm like it's still at the same time. No, there's no high five for you, oh my gosh. But yes, in 2019, still feeling like that, even though we had good savings, I made sure that we had savings kids had savings accounts, all the things, um, and that's, I think, why we were just pushing.
Speaker 2:So hard because we wanted to save way more for the future.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I wanted a nest egg for us for the future, in case YouTube just blew up, I don't know, oh, like they did to us in 2017.
Speaker 2:Our first month we were going to have an epic milestone in 2017, september of 17 our channel blew up things were going on income was coming in music video hit and then, viral thanksgiving morning youtube. Shut down our channel, not shut it down demonetized our channel off the monetization from it now we don't. You guys don't need to care about that as much, but that was what was going on in Madam Rachel's mind. I think honestly what if we get fired? We don't have that as entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:But what if you get fired? What if you lose?
Speaker 1:this you have to have a savings at any time. So that's why you have to start and have that preparation for yourself. So that's my mentality we're constantly broke. We've got to have this. Savings. Do we have enough for so many months, years, whatever in the future? So fast forward, back again 2019, we are pushing and pushing and pushing more more, more Merch line employees, more employees, new departments of our company.
Speaker 2:We've got editors more employees, new departments of our company. We've got editors, filmers, I mean producers, scriptwriters. We were growing and we were going crazy and it looked good.
Speaker 1:It did. It looked good Like progress. It was definitely progressive in some way.
Speaker 2:But what was happening in this couple year period was Rachachel and rykel.
Speaker 1:Rykel is one of the main friends for legos, so rachel and rykel every couple weeks are hopping on all over the place, flying all over the place, me and the boys.
Speaker 2:All of us ended up at disneyland to film for disney world. Then me and the boys, literally that night, flew up to new york to go and film with blue sky studios. They're the ones that did Ice Age and Spy when Will Smith is the spy and he turns into a pigeon, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Anyways, they showed us all that it was amazing.
Speaker 2:But what was funny is I showed up there and we were running around so fast I forgot deodorant, so that whole day it was all these blogger women who are amazing and successful and doing all this and whenever I'd introduce myself, I'm like man, keep the arms down. They all thought I hated them, they thought I was sexist because the way I was acting. But I just felt so bad that I didn't have deodorant, didn't even have time to run down to a shop.
Speaker 1:It was a great indication as to how fast we were moving Exactly, honestly, like we were going from one trip to the next, coming home catching up on school, and we homeschooled, so you know, like we made sure that they were bringing school when we were doing these shoots, we plane schooled at that point we did. We did a lot of plane school. I mean the kids, honestly, they probably didn't know how crazy it was. I think they enjoyed, obviously because they would show up.
Speaker 2:they got to go to disney world, they got to do all these things um, but rachel, on a stage with all these girls screaming and she's like a lego, like I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was, it was amazing it was fun, but it was high stress, high demand and it took a toll on our relationship. We have never fought so much than that year of 2019. Like just fighting constantly.
Speaker 2:We actually hired a therapist to come to our house and do a two day intensive with us because we needed to figure it out. But what's the funny thing? Here's the crazy part. There's many crazy parts, but the most crazy part was we had no idea it was our choices that led to that. We didn't know that we had chosen to be crazy, that we had chosen to have all this. We were just taking advantage. Nickelodeon filming in vegas. Nickelodeon filming here.
Speaker 1:Nickelodeon going to la and we were honestly burning the candlestick from both ends, right, like with a blowtorch. We were going so hard and still to this day, like I'm still feeling the health effects of too much burnout.
Speaker 2:Like Rach, had to have some surgeries because of this. Her body was failing. Thing it was.
Speaker 1:it was scary, it was very scary and honestly we didn't love COVID. But we welcomed the effects of what COVID did, like the shutdown, the time to kind of slow down and like stay at home.
Speaker 2:We actually welcomed that because I welcomed the stay at home, the shutdown and all that I still.
Speaker 1:We're not. We're not saying like COVID itself Stay at home as a family, the results of it. Is what we needed as a family. Slow down, we were still filming. We were still filming. We were still filming yeah, but we were filming painting murals on our wall in the backyard.
Speaker 2:We were like in our house in our backyard, whatever we could do.
Speaker 1:It was so fun, but we slowed down, we slowed down even more, we slowed down all of those things because it got to a point where more was just more Right, like we had this talk just this week.
Speaker 2:It wasn't better, it wasn't anything but more. More is not necessarily growth.
Speaker 1:More is not necessarily better. All the time it was just more, and for us it was more stress, more headaches. It was more growth and more money, but at the same time there was also more cost. So it wasn't like we were making and taking home more money, it was just getting used in other ways.
Speaker 2:If it wasn't late in the evening, I'd sing the Mo Money, Mo Problems song right now. Ah, coming Anyways, so that was so the wrong song. No no. Okay, but there's a movie that did this perfectly. It was Wonder Woman, I think. The second one, when the guy's like you can have more, you can have more and all these people.
Speaker 2:They have more, but it's worse for them to have more. I totally remember that, and so we've seen many friends go through this, where they're going for the more, but the more is ruining what they had, and we went through that More ruining what they had. And we went through that More ruined what we had.
Speaker 1:Honestly, I say we welcomed the effects of COVID because we needed a slap in the face. We needed someone to go. What the crap are you doing? You need a reset. We were so sucked into the middle of it. It was like we were in this tornado or hurricane or whatever and we were just used to it.
Speaker 2:Right, we were just used to chaos and things flying around us we were the frogs in the pot and the water was slowly being turned up and we had no idea we were about to boil to death yeah, honestly and I am grateful that we had no idea we were about to boil to death yeah, honestly.
Speaker 1:And I am grateful that we had the opportunity in COVID to slow down. Don't say that word anymore.
Speaker 2:Just grateful for the opportunity to slow down.
Speaker 1:Yes, we're grateful for the opportunity to slow down and to reflect.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because then 21 was slowly building back up. You know, like things were opening, things were doing things like that and there was a little bit traveling happening, and then 22 kind of got back up to speed a little bit more, and that's when we actually had the opportunity to evaluate in 22 and go do we want?
Speaker 2:more again. Well, we felt it because from 2015, when we started this business, up until 2019, we didn't feel that swing. But from 2020 to 2022, all of a sudden, we felt the swing right the water got turned up way too fast. We're like oh, we're out of here, which led to us being done.
Speaker 1:We were done with more. Now that sounds like really crazy. It sounds like we're going to be lazy and it sounds like we're ready to just like give up. But that's not the case. We wanted to give more to our family. We wanted to invest more in our personal health, our relationship health, more than anything, our family health. So instead of looking sexy and, oh, we have this big business, we do all of these things. We gave that all up so that we could-.
Speaker 2:Have a beer belly. I'm not sexy anymore. I'm sorry it's called a root beer belly.
Speaker 1:Nice honey, nice, thank you, no, but so that we could have more together. Yeah, called a root beer belly. Nice honey, nice, thank you, no, but so that we could have more together. Yeah, and that's when we were done and we decided to leave the united states.
Speaker 2:Well, we decided to go and do service. So we're very religious, we're very christian, we really believe in serving others. I think one of our favorite things up until the decision to leave the country was when we went to Africa and did that service with the wells and then we did the big fundraiser and it really opened our eyes to like, wait a second, we don't just need to keep growing this nest egg. I mean, what's the point If one of us dies early? That thing's useless, is useless. I mean it'll help the one that's still here, but it's not worth. All the focus we did that wasn't bringing us closer, garnering better relationships, taking care of our family instead of taking care of our family's bank accounts.
Speaker 1:And you know what. What's so funny is I personally and I don't know if this is all relationships so you guys need to comment down below or find us on Instagram and tell us. No comment down below, you know, find us on instagram and tell us no comment down below. Go to comment down below. Go to our youtube channel watch this podcast. But is that something that happens in a relationship where one person jace is all about the perspective and the other one's sexy is that where she's going with?
Speaker 1:no, no, I'm saying I had such a hard time slowing that down because we were so poor for so long that mental was still really hard for me, even though during 2020 I had my gallbladder removed. I had so many like it felt like ulcers consistently.
Speaker 2:But they weren't ulcers, they literally were stress eating my stomach alive and that happened to me earlier in our marriage we just traded places.
Speaker 1:We took turns. It's so great.
Speaker 2:I learned my lesson and then you had to learn yours, and that sucked, and that does suck.
Speaker 1:And the reason why I think it's funny is because, perspective wise, I feel like we think so differently and Jace is trying to like change my mind and it took literally health scares to change me and go no time to wake up and slow it down. You know, time to refocus.
Speaker 2:See, and so what? I don't want this to come off as is progress and creation and building. Those aren't bad, but it's almost like when people say, oh, you know, the money is the root of all evil.
Speaker 2:No, the love of money is the root of all evil. Loving money more than people, loving money more than service. Loving money more than all these other things. And so what we're trying to say is once we wanted growth just for growth sake, not for what the growth is supposed to do. Right, eating you're supposed to eat healthy, so your body's great. Now, when I eat the entire box of Oreos in one movie, that's not great. That's not great.
Speaker 1:That's not sexy and I think that is really. The key is obviously moderation in all things. Now, I do think that there are people where they have these big corporations or they grow these, you know these charity companies, or they have their businesses, and that's great. Um, in keeping in perspective how your family is doing, how your relationship is doing, you know, it brings me back to the devil. Wears prada, and there's a point does he?
Speaker 1:though she does. Oh, I'm just kidding, so that in the movie the devil wears prada um, meryl streep is in like the car with Anne Hathaway and she like says something. I love this scene.
Speaker 2:And I hate it when she's like.
Speaker 1:She's like, says like, cause she, Anne Hathaway's complaining Like I have, you know, I want to go to this, I want to do this or something, and like my world's falling apart or something like that. And she says something like well, wait till you really have success, Then you like wait till all your friends have abandoned you.
Speaker 2:Then you'll know you've had success. I think we should run that clip right here because we butchered it, but it's totally true, because once you're willing to give up on everybody for that success, then you'll know you're getting there Pause.
Speaker 1:Is it recording?
Speaker 2:Yep, okay. So with that, you see, when people are willing to give up on people for success and do whatever you will with that, but for us, I always say one thing. I always say one thing and I get so frustrated Like I literally will tell people off in public, out loud if I feel like this is the case and Rach gets so embarrassed when it is policy over people. I get pissed when people won't understand another person because they can hide behind a company policy or some statute or some other thing, when, honestly, if they were to look the person in the eye as a human, they would definitely not do that, and so I get very frustrated.
Speaker 2:There's a really good book by the Arbinger Institute they did, and I forget the name of it Leadership and Self-Deception, and it talks about how, when it gives one that's impressive, what. You just pulled that out of hat. So it's. There's this great example of when people get onto an airplane and you sit down and you've got the seat next to you open, how do you look at everyone else that gets on the plane when you have that open? Oh my gosh, you're like don't sit down.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, so are you looking at?
Speaker 2:people or are you looking at enemies?
Speaker 1:or are you looking at?
Speaker 2:robots. Are you looking at rats?
Speaker 1:That is so interesting because you're really like, you know, like, oh, I hope. And maybe if you were like a single person and you were hoping to like meet a friend, you'd be like, oh, I hope. And maybe if you were like a single person and you were hoping to like meet a friend, you'd be like, ooh, that person looks cute, have them sit down. Or ooh, this person, you know. So maybe it would be like an opposite view, whereas, like when we sit and we book a ticket and we leave the middle seat open, we're like, please, no one sit down, please, because we're hoping for a little bit more space, yep, but let's flip it.
Speaker 2:Somebody is tired, Somebody is getting on a plane, Somebody really wants to have some room up in the baggage thing and sit down so they can get to their funeral yeah, but to you they are some idiot that's going to take your extra leg room, right. And so the whole thing is about how you need to see others as humans. You need to see one thing for me, when I'm driving down the freeway, every once in a while I'll look at the car next to me and I literally will say this in my mind I'll go. God knows them just as much as me. They're the main character in their story. He loves them.
Speaker 1:That's such a great perspective.
Speaker 2:But me, I know all this stuff, I'm this, loves them. That's such a great perspective. But me, I know all this stuff, I'm this. How can that person be as alive as I am? How can that person have goals like I do? How can that person be as human as I am? And I think the world is trying to dehumanize everyone that isn't you, via social media, via all these other things. No, it's just NPCs, it's just anons with you know what I mean? And it's we're humans. I mean prick us, do we not bleed? I mean, let's go into shakespeare, but we actually are all humans trying to do this. Why can't we treat each other like that? Instead of going back to the subject, just progress, just growth and out of my way and that's so true.
Speaker 1:You know, I think like this is a really good time to like reflect and like just take an inventory essentially, and I think that's also good to do in all of your, in your life, in multiple times your life, in your day, because sometimes we get caught up when you're driving and you get road rage and you forget that they're the hero in their story or they're, you know, the one. That's important, right, and like remembering people. So back to our whole, like progress for progress and more, more, more. We were forgetting about the most important people in our lives, which essentially is us, right, our family, us as a relationship and our family, and really talking about, like what's important for our family and progress, it could be really important for our family, and really talking about what's important for our family and progress, it could be really important for our family, because getting out of debt, that was important for our family Every single prayer, yeah, every single prayer for at least 12 of those 15 years, our children-.
Speaker 2:Our cute little girls Would say Please bless us, we'll get out of debt. Please bless us to get out of debt. And I don't even know if they really knew what it meant, but they knew that stressed us out. I mean, I guess we were praying for it.
Speaker 1:We were praying for it, so that's why they did clelia brought her little piggy bank. No, and rikel and rikel christmas would give us their money, and we were I was like oh my gosh, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:It was was so, it was so sweet. So it really was a family affair in the sense of all of us had the same family concern. We wanted to get out of debt so we could provide more opportunities for our family. So the progress was a great thing. In the beginning it was awesome. We got to spend more time together doing some family trips. We got to spend money for afterschool curricular activities like sports, all the things we wanted.
Speaker 1:That's what it was there for, and then it just became too much. It was more, and we were doing more for more sake and not thinking about how important this relationship is. And maybe this relationship needs to just sit down and have a conversation and not film so many videos and fly across the world.
Speaker 2:This relationship is supposed to be more. That's what was supposed to be more, and what were we teaching our children at the time, In the beginning? Sacrifice for the greater right. We are trying to do all this growth. But once we got up there, it was just can we squeeze this trip in with this trip? Can we make this brand change their dates for this? Can we just have more?
Speaker 1:more, more, more more. That is what our family wanted. We thought that's what the kids wanted. We thought this was going to benefit the family. So that's when we go back to that word for myself, when we reflect and we take like a personal inventory of what is important.
Speaker 2:Explain personal inventory. I'm very I would love to hear you explain that really quickly.
Speaker 1:Honestly this could be a whole other podcast but I absolutely love, I follow and I listen to a lot of people that do thought work and where we think about like how important and how powerful our thoughts are. But a personal inventory is really just reflecting. If we're going to do physical personal inventory, I do that a lot because my stomach will hurt if I eat certain things and I inventory all the things that I've done pro for my body and maybe things that have affected my body in a negative way, Like we went to the movie. Did I eat too much popcorn? Did I?
Speaker 1:eat these things that I shouldn't have, or did I offset it with? I had a lot of water. I exercised today, I moved my body, I got enough sleep, right. That's an inventory. But now, emotionally or mentally, we take a personal inventory of how are my thoughts. Am I feeling stressed? Is this work too much for me? Is this whatever too much for me? Am I feeling stressed? Is this work too much for me? Is this whatever too much for me? Am I feeling not just satisfied, because I hate that word, I hate satisfied from Emma Hamilton.
Speaker 1:But you know, like, kind of looking through our life and going, is this giving me the positive things that I need emotionally, spiritually, mentally, as well as offsetting maybe some of those negative things that happen to us? Stress? Or you know, like that burnout that we're talking about, like, how is that inventory working? Am I spending enough time emotionally or like in a relationship with my spouse? How is that doing? How is that going Right? Or we're going to pause one more time? Are we burning up? So, with personal inventory, there's many ways to do it. Whether you write it down, journal, there's so many different techniques. But that, I think, helps us to kind of regulate if we are in a good zone right, like kind of staying in the focus zone of what we want to do and what we're like, what our goals are for our family, our relationship and things like that. Is that what you were thinking?
Speaker 2:Yeah, because for me we've owned so many different retail type businesses For me it's just inventory, Like how many shirts do we have, how many, how many of this?
Speaker 1:How many kisses did I get from my husband today?
Speaker 2:Definitely not enough.
Speaker 1:You know I'm always there for more kisses definitely not enough.
Speaker 2:You know I'm always asking more kisses, but for me and our family, that inventory, what I noticed was more was empty, more wasn't fulfilling and so we were looking for more because our spirits I think we naturally or spiritually want to help others. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm going to step in really fast. I heard this quote and I have to share it. I love the quote because we are quite religious people. I love the quote because it resonates with me really well that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Not human beings have any spiritual experience. Absolutely true. So we have to fill the spiritual bucket, right, like those are the things that our spirit needs. But in this life I think we get caught up in the human needs, right? I mean we definitely have all the human needs.
Speaker 2:We have them all Well it's carnal, that's what our body wants. Our body wants all these different things, but our spirit is supposed to be in control.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, we need to do a whole different podcast on this and like indulgence, because I've done a ton of study on this, but I think we need to stay focused on where we're going, because this is so true and we've had great discussion on this because we get sucked in, especially for me and my health. I find that I get sucked in because I have these cravings for sugar and I have these cravings for salty things or whatever it is. Are you doing?
Speaker 2:this. You're doing this cravings for sugar lots of cravings for sugar, but.
Speaker 1:But I go and I eat certain things and my body feels worse. So giving into those indulgences, those physical things, wasn't actually fulfilling me. But at the same time I might have been needing a emotional need or a spiritual need, and so it was portrayed in a physical need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're going. After all this, we decide that we need to calm down.
Speaker 2:We didn't even know how much we needed to calm down, but we knew we kind of needed to calm down and so we started looking for opportunities in our church to do more service. And our church, the way it's organized, is, everybody that lives within the geographic area, goes to one of our chapels and it depends on where you live, right, and that's called a ward and our ward attends at 10 am at the chapel. That's right here. All the people in that ward have different callings. You're not paid for these, it's service, these it's service.
Speaker 2:And so one of my callings at the time was one of the people that was I don't even know how you'd say a little bit more in charge, which doesn't mean you're at the top of the pyramid. It means it's an inverted pyramid and you're at the bottom trying to hold it all up, and so it's not. Some people look up to it, but to me it was just I am called to serve more. So that was very fulfilling for me. We were so busy I was, it was great, I was very needed and Rach had a calling with the primary children, which is, the younger children up to age 12, up to 11.
Speaker 1:I got to teach them songs and music and you were all in and songs that were all around.
Speaker 2:Basically, she spent hours every week preparing these songs and the lessons that would go with them, so that we can learn these songs. And these are the lessons that come from this and, anyways, it was beautiful.
Speaker 1:It was wonderful, it was so fun.
Speaker 2:But after Sunday we were like gosh, what else? But I got released because you only do these callings for a certain amount of time to give everyone the opportunity to serve. I was released from that calling and then I was put in a calling that was in charge of teaching and helping everybody that taught lessons for different age groups on Sundays. I would help them become better teachers. It was wonderful, but literally it was maybe 30 minutes a week.
Speaker 1:And it's set up in that way so that many people can help serve in different aspects, as to not obviously overwhelm one person, because, again, it's not a profession we don't get paid to do any of the librarian forever right, but you know so that you can do this in addition to your everyday life yes and our everyday life was doing this more and more and more thing and we were like, okay, we need to dial that down and maybe do more of the service thing, because the service is truly giving us that fulfilling feeling and, honestly, it's like creating more love and more peace in our home as we served more, and so Rach actually went on our church's website to look for service opportunities around the globe, actually went on our church's website to look for service opportunities around the globe and she had found one in Edinburgh, scotland, and she's like, hey, we could go and be youth leaders for the 18 to 30-year-olds and organize stuff and be all in charge of that.
Speaker 2:Do activities and fun things and found out we do not make the qualifications, because one of the nicer qualifications, because one of the nicer things or one of the policies with our church is that if you have children at home, you can't go out and do one of these big things, because your children are more important than these types of things. The more, more, more you can get into that in the service area as well, as you could.
Speaker 1:What Jason's talking about is essentially doing more full-time service. Well, as you could. What Jason's talking about is essentially doing more full-time service, much like our children have. So if you followed our family, our oldest child, clay, and in the youth in our church, they go and they give up a year and a half to two years of their life and they do full-time service. So they go anywhere around the world in the United States, all over the world and they teach Wait, they submit.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a quicker. They submit, they choose if they want to go or not. Nobody's forced to. They choose it. They fill out all their paperwork and they put it in, and then the church says okay, well, you are called to go here or else everybody would just say I want to go to Tahiti.
Speaker 1:That's so true. So Clay went to Brazil, and now our second oldest, raquel, is serving her full-time mission in Rome, and both of them it was for 18 months.
Speaker 1:So what Jason's talking about is in our neighborhoods we go and we serve weekly. We go and serve on Sundays, maybe sometimes in the middle of the week, so it's not disrupting really your family time, because that's what it's focused on. The thing I really enjoy about our church is it is family focused and then church supported. So the church is supposed to be supporting the families, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2:But what we wanted to do is we wanted to kind of serve a little bit more of a full time kind of service thing somewhere in the world, so selfish.
Speaker 1:We thought it would be really fun, but they discouraged that when you have children at home children still in school because they don't want you to not focus on your family, which I think is a great plan.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. But for us with homeschooled children, digital businesses and a load of time on our hands because we canceled all these other channels and all these other things that we were doing these. I sold the shares of my company to my business partners. I sold another one of my businesses to the president and he bought the whole company and took that on.
Speaker 2:So I literally was basically retired, and so I went and bought myself a watch because I knew nobody else would, because I've never actually had a real job. But now we had this big opportunity all this time and so we wanted to do this. There were the ups and downs of trying to figure out a way, but we ended up on a road trip to Scotland. We ended up going to church and all the right church leaders that could make certain decisions like this were sitting there in the building.
Speaker 1:It was meant to be. And then this madam was like, hey, you should go talk to him. I was like you should go talk to him. Hey, you should go talk to him. And he's like I don't want to. And I'm like, no, you should go talk to him.
Speaker 2:No, you will go talk to him.
Speaker 1:And we ended up talking to them and saying, hey, if we be able to help and be of service in this area.
Speaker 2:She's making it very official sounding. It was kind of in jest. I was like, oh well, you know, I mean we could always move here and help out. They're like don't tempt us. I was like, no, actually don't tempt us.
Speaker 1:So it literally started like that and turned into a beautiful it just honestly, we really felt. We really felt that the lord was like yes, you should do this, this will be good for your family this is what will help.
Speaker 2:The scriptures say a burzing, a burzing, uh burning in the bosom. It literally like we had fire in the bosom. We were like I like was so motivated we felt this is the next step so that next step we ended up confirming, with them saying, all right, if we came out here, would you actually have something for us to do? And they're like well, actually we would need people in charge of communications and PR and interfaith work.
Speaker 1:We know how to do that, yes.
Speaker 2:And I love studying world religions. We did not fill these shelves with all the books that I have because we were trying to decide to or not. Of all of the books we have on different world religions and apocryphal works, all the things that I study and read, I literally wake up at five and I read till seven, till everyone else is awake, and I love these subjects and Rach is so good at it and I'm kind of a nutcase, but I really love it too. So we said, well, if that's a thing social media, interfaith work, all these things oh my gosh, we would actually love to come out here for that. That sounds like a full-time job to us.
Speaker 1:We, we literally jumped at it. We jumped at it so much that we put our house on the market to sell. We felt that we could go for years. We were like we could do three years, five years. I think this would be amazing. We put our house on the market. We sold so many things that I am now-.
Speaker 2:Half of my arcade is still gone.
Speaker 1:We sold so many things because we were dead set. We thought we need to move, so we put our house on the market. We sold so many things. We put offers on homes in Scotland. That's right. We offered on homes in Scotland. We worked with people in Scotland after the offers fell through because we learned some things about buying houses in another country. It's not super easy, but we had so much help on the Scotland side. We made some wonderful friends and they helped us find a rental. They helped us find all these things and it was not easy. You would think that we had this burning and we thought this was the right thing to do and doors would just open. It was freaking hard, it was not easy. Like you would think that, like we had this burning and we thought this was the right thing to do and doors would just open. It was freaking hard.
Speaker 2:It was not easy at all. Probably 14 times, maybe only three.
Speaker 1:But we, there were a couple days. He's like we're not doing it, we're not going.
Speaker 2:Well, okay, so we go to one of our church meetings there's like 300 people in this one. It's more of an area one, not just these little ones here where we live, just to put that in there and we go and sit down and we had just been told no, a few different times on us being able to go and serve. This was before we went to Scotland, but they wanted us to come. Oh, it wasn't before. Okay, so we had gone to Scotland, talked with them. They wanted us to come, we wanted to go, and we go to this church meeting. They're like we need more people to serve internationally from our area. We're like we're trying you have the means, you have the lifestyles that you could take some time away and go and help out in these other areas.
Speaker 1:And we're like we didn't physically put our hands up.
Speaker 2:And then they called some friends of ours they're in between acquaintance and friends and they literally called them to the exact thing they had just told us no to, but in a city, in Birmingham instead of in Edinburgh.
Speaker 1:And we were like no, what is happening? Why can't we go and do this? I?
Speaker 2:literally almost walked out of the room. Rach had to put her hand on me. I leaned over and I said I'm walking out of here.
Speaker 1:She's like there were some serious words.
Speaker 2:I put my elbows on my knees, I leaned my head down and I sat there grumbling because we wanted to do it. It was the right motives, but what's interesting now is it couldn't have happened that way. The way that it happened is the only way that actually would have worked, and so, once again, I'm a stubborn dirtbag and once again, we were blessed in so many ways that it happened the way that it did.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, if they would have accepted our offers on our home, we would have lost so much money and we would not like. We wouldn't have been able to buy it and they would have kept all of our money.
Speaker 1:We learned so many things, and many negative things, that we learned about living in another country, which will be in another podcast. So stay tuned for that, but we were so grateful that it was a little bit harder that our house didn't sell, because now we're back in our house, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2:So happy.
Speaker 1:You know, and we're so grateful for all the ways that it happened, but we did eventually make it to Scotland. We left, we made it to Scotland, we were done with this life, but we kind of took some of it with us. We took the YouTube with us. We went from a huge team down to just our family again.
Speaker 2:Just to us again.
Speaker 1:And we took our family to Scotland. We literally sold so many things and we packed how many bags? 20?, 23 bags. We packed 23 bags, which 12 of those were giant luggages, like the duffel bags that we checked, like massive 50 pound.
Speaker 2:We ended up getting upgraded, and so we were allowed to pack some of them like four of them to 70 pounds. So we had I forget it was like a thousand something pounds we took to Scotland. But what's funny is is on the way home we brought just that much. We brought more than that back, but nothing that we took there did we bring back because the kids all tripled in size this way. Not like me this way.
Speaker 1:But we literally moved our whole family across the world and in those duffels were really just like clothes, shoes, a lot of books and coats, because it's real cold there.
Speaker 2:And so we arrived. The house was built in 1745. We had to heat it with oil and coal fireplaces.
Speaker 1:We did not know what that meant.
Speaker 2:We didn't know what that meant, we didn't know how to do that. We learned that's a very cold way to heat your house and expensive. But what ended up happening was we had breakfast every single morning as a family and we did a scripture study at, I'd say, 80, some odd percent of those breakfasts in that one room, looking over the river, at the countryside.
Speaker 2:I cried when, my last time looking out that window, if you want to go and find our actual YouTube channel, don't? It is so sad. It was so hard to leave. We ended up completely integrating into our local ward, just like we had here, but over there, and instead of three to six hundred people attending, there was 40 to maybe 70 on a really big day oh, man and we were able to help. But what was crazy was we thought we were going there to help others. It changed.
Speaker 2:We ended up going there and they helped us.
Speaker 1:It was, it was what happened, an incredible, incredible thing that we did for our family, and I know this, this can't happen for everybody, um, and we have like a special kind of circumstance that it worked out really great for us, but giving up the more, more, more. We progressed in totally different ways by not having the more, more, more and by going and serving we gained so much more.
Speaker 1:We're going to do it in the next episode, the next podcast episode, so you're going to have to listen or watch for that, because we gained so much more and there were some things that we were like. We learned that we were didn't love, we didn't love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it wasn't all roses and pomegranates it was. It was hard, it was hard.
Speaker 1:It was hard, but probably the best growth that we have had as a couple, as a family and in relationships with our kids, like individually, you know, like with our children.
Speaker 2:So what could other people that might not have the extenuating circumstances that we have, with kids at home and all this, what are things, normal, people that you looking at what we did, what are micro versions of that or just different versions of that that other people can go and do?
Speaker 1:I fully believe that service will change your life. Now I know that there's some people that do charities but really small service and that's so weird, Like you want to make this huge impact, Like we did go to Africa and we helped build wells.
Speaker 2:And schools and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1:And that was really wonderful and definitely impactful. But I'm going to say that this amount of daily service, weekly service, that we did where we focused on service.
Speaker 2:It was every day, it was every single day.
Speaker 1:Like we, focused on service. It was every single day Like we focused on service. That changed us and that, I think, made a bigger impact than raising $15,000 for wells in Africa. Like I mean for me, that's what I feel.
Speaker 2:You know what we've done. That, I think, was just as impactful. But a micro version of this is when we went to the road home and took blankets and coats and then you go and serve food and things like that are the exact same as this and they won't cost you tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 1:Honestly, there are so many opportunities in every community and I think we just need to have kind of our blinders taken off to what service looks like. I think that service is not necessarily these huge things all the time. Right, we can't go in and serve at the homeless shelter every week. You know, like I know, that life doesn't always permit that. But I think service looks different all around you. But if you are focusing on it on a daily basis, things will come up. I truly believe that if you are praying for opportunities to serve someone in your family, serve a community member serve a neighbor or just helping.
Speaker 1:in some way, the opportunities will come, and that literally like if you're a member of our faith or a member of Christianity, you can serve in your own congregation, serve in your own church, asking your church leaders how you can help people, whether that's just hey, come over for a meal and I'll feed you.
Speaker 2:Can I sweep the building?
Speaker 1:Can I sweep the building Literally in Scotland every three months. It was our turn as a family in that ward to clean the chapel and that's how it is. All around the world Members of our congregation take turns cleaning the chapel. That keeps the cost down and stuff. And we're washing windows and we're vacuuming the you know, the rugs and the carpet and it's not a big deal. It took our family an hour because there's many of us.
Speaker 2:It was actually wonderful.
Speaker 1:But it was fun.
Speaker 2:It was kind of fun. It sucked to get in the car and to go over there, but then it was wonderful when we got back into the car when we were done.
Speaker 1:Serving lifts your spirits in a way that nothing else can.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, think of this. Your body craves the sugars and the nasty foods and all of that stuff. It thinks that's going to be great. Once you eat it, then it's terrible. You hate it.
Speaker 1:It's a bad feeling your body's like service.
Speaker 2:Your body does not naturally want to go and do. But, by the time you're done. Your spirit loves it.
Speaker 1:Yep, and your spirit is craving it more and more. So, honestly, even though we, the things we were doing in Scotland, were not life changing one thing, right it was, it was multiple things. So we would go and clean the chapel, we would help out in the youth programs.
Speaker 2:We organized events for gathering youth together to have fun.
Speaker 1:Jace would create honestly like little, like Instagram, facebook reels of things that other people were doing, other services or spending time with family or, you know, focusing on your community, like he was creating nice, uplifting, happy type things and sharing it. This was these are small things, but things that, like, everyone can do and if we focus on it, even if it's just once a week, like oh, I'm gonna do a little, I wanna increase my service, maybe I'm gonna say hi to my neighbor, maybe my neighbor wants some cookies, maybe I'm just gonna Pull in their trash bins for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I mean honestly it doesn't have to be huge and we're coming up on fall and the holidays. There's so many opportunities raking leaves, going and donating old blankets or coats, like Jay said, to homeless shelters. You know there are bigger things that you can do and those things will be way more impactful on yourself, your family, your relationships, and that's like such a great memory to have with your family, like our kids remember bringing their old coats that were too small for them to wear, old blankets that you know we just had newer ones and bringing them to the homeless shelter, right, like that's a memory that they're going to keep. So if we have those opportunities, that's something that's going to last way longer than, honestly, going to Disneyland.
Speaker 2:What I love with this is we don't have like this big note board and bullet points and we just kind of see where this goes. And in my mind I'm going through this and it was we had literally almost nothing physically, or you know, monetarily, and then we got to the point where we did, and then we had anything you could ever want.
Speaker 1:We had all the things we weren't billionaires.
Speaker 2:We weren't like we're all this great, but we could afford what we wanted. And then we took it back down to living in this other house and it wasn't like we went broke or anything, but we lived a completely different lifestyle. And so what's the takeaway from all of this?
Speaker 1:For me. I would like to say that the takeaway is more is just more, and more can be amazing, but I think it's up to you to decide. Is more beneficial to you and your family, is it? You know, taking that personal inventory we kind of talked about and deciding is this going to benefit your life in the long run and your relationships in the long run? Because I think the houses, all the things, they're going to go to waste eventually, they're going to corrode and they're going to, like, go nasty, but the relationship that we have, the relationships that we have with our kids, that's what's going to last forever. Right, like the stories of how we spend time together. That's what's going to last forever. So, is more what you really want? Is that something that is going to help your relationship progress and get better, or is more just more?
Speaker 2:So basically that tipping point right, it's good, good, good, good, good, good good, and then all of that good gets to a point to where it tips and then it's not actually good anymore.
Speaker 2:Malcolm Gladwell did a book I think this one was in David and Goliath but also the tipping point was a good one. But was that Seth Godin? Nevermind, but there's one called David and Goliath and there's a point where he says what's interesting at the time this was like early 2000s and he said what's interesting is the level of happiness people feel after about $72,000 a year. Their happiness doesn't increase with the income. That gets higher, and once it gets even so much higher, it actually goes down.
Speaker 2:And there's all these different cases of where it was really easy when they didn't have anything. When their kids are like mom, I want a pony, we can't afford a pony, it's so much harder. But then they have all this money and now all of a sudden they're like mom, I want a pony. Okay, oh wait, now we have to pay to. Now we have to pay to board it, we have to pay to train it, we have to pay to do this. And all of a sudden, all this extra money and all this stuff you've been working for is what you're using to pay for your houseboat slip and the rentals and all the different things to where now?
Speaker 2:you're not happier, it's just more, it's just more stuff. You're not happier, it's just more, it's just more stuff, more. So for us, what we try is, when we start to have some turmoil, when we start to have issues, we're like okay, have we added too much in one area? Where do we need to take away from? And Rach doesn't like it because the way that I do this isn't very good. He likes to rip off the bandaid and and take it all away.
Speaker 1:I love ripping, which is finding a balance of when. That is the right time for that, because if it's like, oh wait, a second.
Speaker 2:I have cancer that has taken out this part of my leg. I would cut the fricker off. I would I would cut it off. And so you know, right, like when the scriptures if you're left-eyed, you pluck it out. If this hand offends, you cut it off, right. I truly am like if there is a cancer in the family, what is it? And I'm going to cut it out.
Speaker 2:And not children or family members or any of that. That's not what I'm talking about. Is it a certain TV show all of a sudden we're all watching that's putting us in a funky mood? Is it the type of music that's all of a sudden creeping into the house that's ruining things? I will cut things out. Did we get a new board game that's pissing everybody off? Yeah, I will chuck the board game. I will chuck the ps3. I will chuck the remote control guys, he has done it before I have done it chucked so many things and it again, baby.
Speaker 1:But I think it's an important thing to note that he's just honestly, he's just doing an inventory of what is good in the home, what is not good in the home, what is benefiting the home, creating good, better relationships, creating better experiences and what is causing negativity in the home. Now, not always is stress negative, right? So that's a little bit of a different thing. But I think that that's a huge takeaway is to take that inventory of yourself.
Speaker 1:And don't be as rash as I am. Don't be, no, don't. Don't. Don't just rip off the bandaid. Do we still need the bandaid? We might need the bandaid.
Speaker 2:I promise we won't bleed to death once the bandaidaid is off, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:But I think it's important to take that inventory and kind of evaluate if you're moving in the right direction that you wanted to as a couple, as a person, as a relationship, as a family, you know or again, is it just more stuff that needs to be thrown away?
Speaker 2:I think with that, that is the takeaway from this. Do an inventory, see if the more that you're focused on is just more, or if that focus is going towards something that is actually beneficial. And it can be really scary. We can say this sitting here, because we did this version of it.
Speaker 1:It's hard.
Speaker 2:But if you're in it it is nearly impossible to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah hard. If you're in it, it is nearly impossible to see yeah and it and it is really really hard to to accept somebody else's um thoughts on what you're going through, you know what I mean. It's hard for us to do that between the two of us it's very, very hard, but if you can come to a state where you can accept people's thoughts and not, you don't have to take everyone's in. But maybe you think is this something I need to think about?
Speaker 2:is this something that you're saying? Do an inventory of what people are saying and giving you advice on maybe so there's lots of ways you can do inventory.
Speaker 1:Comment down below if we should do an inventory podcast or if you actually want to hear in our next episode all the crazy things that we went through living in another country and the takeaways that were not always great. There was amazing things that happened which we can share as well, but there was some really hard things so thank you guys for hanging out with us again.
Speaker 2:We are so excited for this season. We are going to try as hard as we can to do an episode every week, and I am 90% sure we can, unless our week is crazy and this filming another episode just becomes more.
Speaker 1:It's never more, because it's valuable for you guys and for us, and I absolutely love it, so we're going to try.
Speaker 2:So thank you for coming along for our personal therapy sessions that we're going through but comment down below. We love the comments. Go to past videos. See what other people have commented on our Raising Ohana podcast YouTube channel, because I am always in those comments. Rach is in those comments.
Speaker 1:We love to have a discussion and if you are listening to this podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, go and check out our YouTube podcast or follow us on Instagram at Rach Bennett and Jace Bennett with an S, because we want to interact with you, we want to answer your questions, as well as bring on some experts as well as some fun friends. Oh, you've got some epic people to discuss some topics that we've got coming up okay, thank you guys for watching, listening and hanging out.