Well, this update is LONG overdue. We were pretty good about making frequent updates last spring after the fire, but once we approached planting season, things just became a bit overwhelming and the myriad of duties around the farm, homestead, and business overtook us. The reality is that the initial recovery from the fire took most of our time for a couple of months, and that put us behind on everything else, which we then spent the rest of the year trying to catch up on.
So in this update I’d like to review the past year, both the challenges we faced and the tremendous blessings given to us by God.
After the smoked cleared from the fire, and it became clear that our seed business had been destroyed and we would need to start over again right as our busy season started, we had some pretty big obstacles to overcome. Though we considered a number of options for how to get operations started again, we quickly settled on buying a mobile shed building to set up operations in. We quickly obtained new bulk seeds and re-packed many thousands of seed packets with the help of our kids as well as neighbors and friends from around our area that all pitched in to help us get our inventory back in stock quickly. With the help of several skilled neighbors and friends, and the financial support of so many, we got the framing and electrical on the new office space done very quickly, and we were able to start using the main part of the office for order fulfillment within a month of the fire. God blessed us to be able to resume taking orders on our website three weeks after the fire and shipping them in the week that followed.
The seed-buying season, along with shop cleanup and trying to organize everything without our main tool storage area kept us busy for a couple of months, and we got behind on seed starting and garden prep. That required a little more focused effort around our last spring frost, which came a bit late, but we got most of our crops into the ground on time. It seemed like we were always behind on some garden tasks for the entire year, but the Lord was good to us and gave us a great harvest overall.
For a myriad of reasons, our seeds sales were down about 40% from the time we re-opened after the fire and remained that way until near the end of the year. This significant drop in revenue gave us some significant constraints – most of all that we were not able to easily hire more help to assist us with our overflowing task list. Due to this cashflow and manpower shortage, we did not make much progress on cleaning out the shop and documenting items for insurance claims for most of the year, and are still in that process today. Please pray for diligence in completing this difficult process.
Despite these challenges, God’s blessings were abundant and overflowing to us this year. First, no one was hurt in the fire, and there were some tools and other items that were not destroyed. We had financial support that came from everywhere it seemed, and offers to help were abundant in our local community, and that was instrumental in us being able to get back up and fulfilling orders in only three weeks.
A tragic setback like this offers the temptation to only focus inward and cease looking for opportunities to serve others. Fortunately, due to our family’s desire to prioritize hospitality and our children’s love of people, we hosted monthly country dances at our farm throughout the summer for the youth in our church and community, which provided lots of opportunity to create a wholesome culture for our kids and others like them to enjoy time together like the old days.
At the end of the summer, we were especially blessed to have four of our children baptized in our creek, with nearly 140 family and friends in attendance. God has been good to redeem our covenant children and make them His own, renewed to walk in faith in Him.
When Thanksgiving arrived, we had much to be thankful for, including the aforementioned blessings, and topped with the news that our oldest daughter Lydia was engaged to be married to a wonderful young man named Jonathan, who also just bought a new house for his future bride, and they are working diligently to prepare it to be their home when they get married in May.
One of the things we decided to forego this year to reduce our workload was raising pigs, and we were blessed to be able to buy two pigs from our neighbors who raise them to the same standards that we do. So in early December, we resumed our annual family tradition of a hog slaughter and butchered all the meat to provide pork for our family for the next year. While we came down with a pretty miserable flu on the second day of the process, the Lord was good to give us cold weather to give us more time to be able to process the meat. What normally is a 2-3 day process ended up taking almost an entire week to do the primary processing, but we finally finished and enjoyed curing and smoking hams and bacon in the weeks that followed.
There are countless other blessings that the Lord gave to us this year, including beautiful sunsets, a fertile flock of sheep, time together in the garden and at the creek, a bountiful garden harvest and plenty of good food, and memorable times with family and friends. We cannot recount all of them, but all of them cause us to give glory to God with thankful hearts for His bountiful goodness to us, even as He used the fire and its aftermath to be a refining fire to bring us to the end of ourselves in many ways and rely upon Him and the body of Christ to make it through the tough times.
We still have much work to do to recover from the fire, including completing the cleanout out the shop, the insurance claim process, and eventually, rebuilding the shop building. We would appreciate your prayers for endurance with the many projects before us, and that God would bless our sales revenue with growth this year to provide us with the resources to be able to get the help we need to accomplish them in a timely manner.
As we face this new year, we are hopeful that the work that God has begun in and through us is not over, but that He will bring His plans to fruition. For we are confident in God’s promises in His holy Word:Â
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” ~Jeremiah 29:11
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“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” ~Romans 8:28
