Hey there!

I am currently in sunny Florida where our family visits every year. It's an opportunity for us to refresh, recenter and refocus what this next year will look like for our farm, our home and our family. This is also our very first blog post......and to be honest, I have struggled to know what to say/write. Usually I am never at a lack for words. Yet, here I am wondering what I can share with you that will encourage you and empower you to reach beyond the norm for this next year. I hope it's okay to take you back a few years but I think it will pique your interest. Also, I am a Christ follower, it is evident in everything I say and do, and it can't be hidden. I preface this for those that may not have the same viewpoints, I want you to feel just as welcome to read and be encouraged. It is never my goal to make everything I say or do an impression that you must be or do the same. I simply want to encourage you and share with you what I have discovered in this journey we call life.

By nature, I am a doer. I go, go, go and I easily set myself up for burn out. I associate doing nothing, taking a break or even resting as weak, lazy and at risk of not being able to accomplish my goals. I can easily drown myself in work and keep my candle burning well into the night, taking the absolute bare minimum sleep to keep going; thinking this is how I accomplish more, faster. But really, I am just setting myself up for frustration, failure and burnout. I have had prayer lists requesting God to create more time to accomplish goals but to also bestow peace on my life. I have had to learn to Rest, which, in my humble opinion is weak and only going to set me back in my accomplishments….but God, has this weird word and command that calls me to rest first before he answers my request to have more time and peace.

In 2020 the word REST was played over and over. Our family began the journey of learning to rest, fully. Rest in our decisions, rest in the waiting, rest in the chaos of life, rest in the challenges, rest in what was to come and rest in the here and now. On our journey to find rest, we discovered incredible redemption from the bondage of a storming world, we experienced a true peace that can only be obtained from this kind of rest. As we applied rest to our life, we took hold of keeping a sabbath-a lost art really...this was slightly foreign to us, not going to lie. Yes, we have heard the term and known people who used it in their christianese-verbiage but it was irrelevant to us yet we read all through God's word the command to keep the sabbath and to keep it holy.....Our word for 2021 was SABBATH...or SHABBAT(my preferred reference) and we began to define and refine what sabbath looked like for our family and home. Funny though, sabbath literally means, 'to rest'. We were in the middle of learning all the aspects of rest and the blessings it produces in our lives and God began to show us how it can be applied to all areas....Little did we know that our understanding of Rest was just going to deepen in our practice of Shabbat. Living a life of PEACE would be an appropriate example of resting and practicing a day set apart to take notice of the work we are doing and surrender it to God’s leading and guiding. I will write an article to share with you our ‘REST’ pursuit and how our family applied rest and what that looks like in our everyday life.

At the end of 2021 we had purchased land and began creating a homestead. Starting 2022 we were a fully functioning homestead with Scottish highland cows, a Guernsey milk cow, 46 laying hens and learning how to be the most efficient in all our endeavors. Our word for 2022? WAITING. I even thought to myself, ‘waiting? what are we not getting? Isn’t waiting the same thing as rest?’, well… the definition for waiting is to ‘delay action’ or ‘until something else happens’, soo… We continued to apply and pursue Rest & Shabbat but now we added Waiting to our pursuit. We continued to work our homestead and pray about what the future would look like and how we could share with others this lifestyle we now lived and thrived in. We knew something was coming, we just didn’t know what-so we waited. Resting in God and setting aside a day(shabbat) to lift up in prayer for clarity and direction in what was to come. We see now, that every thing we did on our homestead, in our home and the adjustments we made for our family truly was God-led. We could’ve done so many things and pursued so many avenues yet us waiting and resting yielded an even better result.

So, here we are holding our word for 2023. BUILD. This word has been playing over and over and over in my heart and mind. Build what!? I mean, we have a lot of structures that need built but I know there is more to this word than the obvious. As we discover this word given to us for this year’s pursuit I want to show you something pretty epic The definition for the word, ‘BUILD’ is, “make stronger or more intense”. As I reflect on the happenings up to this point, it makes complete sense that this is our next word, our next journey and our next lesson. We are taking everything God has done and is continuing to do, and we are going to make it stronger; we are going to intensify our call to action. A story comes to mind about a man who lived thousands of years ago. For ages, children stories have been written about this man, his cute little animals and his giant boat. He was told to build this boat in a desert, mind you, a boat had never been built before AND it had never rained. His whole story is less than the cute depiction of the modern version. Yet, his call to action was ‘build a boat’. He had to look beyond the obvious and trust that what he was building would indeed fulfill its designed purpose; that every effort, obedient choice and step forward would make a life changing impact on the future. He didn’t stop working on his project because it became too cumbersome-talk about a lot of work! He didn’t have a hardware store or planers to smooth out each plank. His task was huge! Yet he pressed on to completion. From start to finish, it would take this man approximately 100 years to build a boat half the size of the titanic.

Let me reiterate something, he was in a desert! There wasn’t a body of water in site to test the buoyancy and design of the rookie boat maker’s creation. He became infamous for his “folly” and had generated a lot of nay sayers, ridiculing him for his “insane” pursuit. I believe when God calls you to a task, a plan or an assignment, and we answer it with obedience and trust, he faithfully strengthens, provides and sustains us. He makes it rain in the desert places and he keeps us safe, staying afloat when life is a freaking storm! That is the key to resting in his calling, waiting in his timing and building in obedience. He has this sovereign way of making time, resources and ways out of nothing and empowering you when you listen to him and not the world…and when it all is said and done, it is incredibly impactful to many! This is how our family will approach this next year; from our homestead to our business, from our home to our community, from our family to our friends we will build and strive to make every step impactful.

How does resting, waiting and building look for you and your home? Are you seeing results or are you wondering what you are missing? More often than not, we can feel stuck and it’s not that we are stuck at all; we are simply more focussed on the wrong things or the craziness around us. The antidote is literally resting and refocussing. Allow me to clarify something, rest doesn’t mean doing nothing or to be lazy. It actually means to recover strength and take a moment to refresh from the stress. As a runner, when you take a ‘break’, you don’t stop all movement at once, you slow your pace and movement to regroup and get ready to go at it again. We can see in the story of the man who devoted 100 years of his life to build a boat with no peek into the future as to what the end result would actually look like. We see that he pressed on, resting in the call, trusting the timeline and the direction God called him to. As I look over the last 3 years, I see growth in my thinking and just how I approach life in general; specifically in this area of “rest”. So much has been accomplished and I can honestly say I am not burned out whatsoever. I feel more at peace and even more motivated to 'Build’. I love how God, in his instruction and growing process, leads us to discover truths and the answers we seek. We were never meant to live chaotic lives, we were meant to live peaceful lives, even in chaotic times. If you are struggling to feel peace or you don’t know how to rest for more than a moment in time, the answer lies in trusting, waiting and building in Him; who created you in the first place. God, in his infinite ways, creates the space for you to thrive and be at peace. I pray this over your life. I pray that you feel his peace and rest in every forward motion, accomplishing bigger things than you thought possible.