2 Years on The Faithful Homestead

Well friends, it’s been two years since we bought our farm and gave it the name, The Faithful Homestead.

If you would have told me that we’d be full blown homesteaders with cows and chickens and puppies and tractors and living this country life, I would have laughed SO hard.

But if you also told me that I would have found myself here, fallen in love with this life, and that my family would be thriving, I would have been even more floored.

Despite close friends putting bets on how long our family would last living this farm life, we have now passed the 2-year mark. I’m always up for a challenge and want to defy the odds. And in my best efforts to prove people wrong, I ended up falling in love with this life and never want to go back.

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I’ve been a Christian since I was 6 years old when I innocently “prayed the sinner’s prayer,” but life has knocked me down over and over and over again. Most of you know my testimony (if not, you can preorder my new book here!) but I’ve lived as a shell of a person for years because of the pain I have had to endure (and continue to endure).

As much as my personality is weaved with confidence and strength in Christ, I didn’t feel like I was living in the abundance of God’s grace that He has offered each and every one of us.

The fear of pain sometimes kept me from living free.

It took getting in the peace and stillness of the farm for me to begin to heal in new ways. I heard God here. Not in a loud life altering way, but in a quiet and convicting way as He spoke to me saying how I could stop striving now. I could rest. I could actually take a deep breath and exhale all my fears as I live in contentment, grace, and His perfect peace.

Life is lived in the valley, isn’t it? Very rarely do we stay on the mountaintop for more than a few moments until the next difficult burst comes our way. But I have learned to love the valley because it’s there that I am closest to my Savior. I never want to be far from Him.

The valley (and the fires of life) is where we are forged and this farm (while amazing) has been the place where I have grown more than I have in any other season of my life. I thank the Lord for the projects and endless hours of hard work. The silence and the animals. I thank God for the sleepless nights, power outages, and all the things that brought me to my knees in prayer. I thank God for the bad days, the rain, and the sun and the snow.

I thank God for it all because if our last two years had been perfect, I wouldn’t have grown in all of these ways or appreciated what He has given us.

I don’t want hard things (I’m assuming you don’t either) but I thank God for His grace and closeness in them because at the end of the day, I grew closer to Him here on the farm and understand His abundance in new ways.

Thank you Lord, for The Faithful Homestead.