Fire Recovery Update - Apr 7, 2023

It has been a very busy couple of weeks, so we apologize for the delay in getting an update posted.

If you have followed our family for many years, as some of you have, you know that Jason was an US Air Force pilot. He served on active duty for almost 11 years, and served all over the world, especially after 9/11. As we started having children and building our family, he selflessly gave up his quickly advancing career towards command and high rank, transitioning to the Air Force Reserve and retired in 2019. He wanted to give us roots. At the time, we didn’t know all that would come with that decision. Great blessings and great trials awaited us. A story too long to tell in this format, but if you want to know more, come to our home and eat a meal with us.

As we approached the retirement ceremony we were experiencing some major spiritual battles in our home, mostly around Jason. You see, Satan loves bondage. God loves freedom in Christ. Jason retiring meant that a warrior that was being held bondage to the military was about to be set free from that system. As we tried to leave to travel to New Jersey for the weekend and the retirement ceremony, many different things were causing us to run way behind schedule.

My heart was so heavy and burdened about all that was transpiring around me in what seemed an out of my control situation. As we finally get ready to leave I had this overwhelming burden to pray over our home. So as my family waited and without me telling anyone, I walked around my home, praying out loud for protection over our home. Not any protection, but protection from FIRE! I have no idea why I prayed for fire protection in the summer months, but this is how I was led to pray and so I did. Room to room. I cried and begged God to protect our home, family, and animals.

Fast forward four and a half years… about a week after the fire I was walking through my home and God said, “Remember, you prayed for me to protect you from fire.” At that moment, I had a very sanctifying moment, one of being refined by fire. Yes! I had prayed for protection from fire over my home. I didn’t even understand in the moment then. But now, I see.

You see, God is omniscient. He is outside of time. We pray sometimes thinking that our prayers are for the here and now. We get discouraged or think our prayers are futile. Humbly I admit, I have had periods when I have stopped praying out of discouragement. This was out of my weak faith and represents nothing about my God. He doesn’t change. But in that moment, when God reminded me of my prayers all those years ago, it has given me such an encouragement and humbling reminder of who HE is despite who I am. When I say to Jason, “I know God is going to do something amazing through this trial.” He has reminded me, “He already has.”

The week before the fire we have been speaking with two local families about coming on that Saturday. One was a family with small children we had never met in person before and another a family with small children whom we invited to join us to grind our pork into sausage. At the last minute, both families cancelled. They would have been there with their small children when the fire broke out. We are so thankful that God knew about the fire beforehand and held them back so that their families didn’t have to experience that trauma. However, this past week, we had the privilege of hosting both families, on different days. We shared, laughed, learned, and encouraged one another. We ground a couple hundred pounds of sausage and made brats and sausages. We own a commercial grinder that was stored in the shop when it burned, but God miraculously protected it. Jason had moved it onto a bottom shelf near the floor just days before and so it was protected from fire, falling items, heat, water etc. Jason installed a 240V outlet in the new shed building, so for a half day, the new seed shop became a butcher shop. 🙂 We are so thankful to have our freezers full again with sausage and so thankful God brought new and old friends together this past week.

This past week, we celebrated Jason’s birthday, and God arranged the timing such that he and I left midday on his birthday to travel up to northern Virginia to pick up the Honda Odyssey that our old friends decided to sell to us when they upgraded to a larger vehicle for their growing family. We were able to catch up briefly with our friends, and have a wonderful birthday dinner at an amazing restaurant in Manassas, Virginia. We were able to go to Cabela’s before returning home, which was a fun time.

Our old Odyssey was totaled last month when a deer jumped out into the road at night when Jason was driving home from Bible study and hit the front driver side. It was a mercy from the Lord, because that older van needed several thousand dollars of work, and we were about to take it to the shop to have that work completed when God ordained for the deer to total it and preclude that waste of money. The new Odyssey is a 2012 with a little over 100K miles and our friends sold it to us for less than half of the market value as a way to help us through our current challenges. The Lord has blessed us tremendously.

Progress on the new shed continues slowly, mostly due to the high pace of current order fulfillment and early spring garden/farm tasks, but we continue to move towards completion. Jason decided to install an extra window in the office room of the shed. This allows him to see the gorgeous view down the hollow to the northwest. He spends a tons of time in his office and is always wishing he was outside instead, so this helps him be able to bear being stuck inside, and keep a closer eye on all the things going on outside. The paneling will soon be complete, and Jason will occupy his new office hopefully in the next week.

A young man from church and our sons helped Jason build and install a temporary sliding barn door over the garage door to the burned shop, since the old garage door was demolished by the firefighters when they were fighting the fire. This will help keep weather and animals out of the building while also making it easily accessible for cleaning out.

We also were able to spread grass seed and hay on the trenches that were dug for electric and internet. However, though not unusual, the winds picked up the next day and blew all the hay away, exposing the seed to the chickens. So some of the kids went and applied seed and hay again, and today we are getting a beautiful soaking rain. Hopefully with this nice spring weather, we will have grass growing back quickly.

Thank you so much for your concern and support for our family through this long, challenging process of recovering from the fire and all the challenging impacts it has had on us. Please continue to pray for us, that God would work in and through us to change us to be more like Jesus each day, and to bring all glory to Himself.

Many blessings,

Shannon and Jason, for the whole family