In this episode of Theology Applied, Pastor Joel Webin is joined by Rory Groves, author of the book, " Durable Trades: How to Be Self-Sufficiency in the 21st Century." Rory and his family have been working on a project to become more self-reliable and self-supporting in order to survive in the modern world.
00:04:42.400Oh, man. Let's see. There's a bunch of jumping off points that I could go down. I think cancel culture is kind of like the latest iteration, the latest handwriting on the wall to say I probably need to become a little bit more self-reliant and get myself untethered from this system, this matrix that I'm completely a part of and unable to live without.
00:05:12.400So you talked about kind of recognizing some of these things over the last 18 months. My background is as a computer programmer. I've spent the last 20 years in high technology. I've started my own software company. I've been very much immersed in that whole world for most of my life. Computer science degree in college and all of that.
00:05:34.040And so there was a point at time about 10 or 11 years ago where I was I was actually watching some documentary about kind of like apocalyptic prepper kind of information and like that.
00:05:51.400And it just struck me one time. Do I have anything useful I could contribute to society if the lights went out?
00:05:57.780right right and uh the answer was a definitive no i don't know how to build things i don't know
00:06:05.520how to grow things i don't know how to subsist without this incredibly um high level of
00:06:12.140infrastructure beneath me and so um this kind of started just a curiosity of that ended up me
00:06:19.500resulting in me moving my family out to a rural property um i continued on i didn't plan to leave
00:06:26.220the technology side of things. But as I got more involved in like farming and shepherding and
00:06:31.960working with the land and working with my family while we were working the land,
00:06:36.420it really started to open my eyes to like, okay, there are some very practical ways
00:06:42.560that we can reclaim some of these home-based functions and these home economics functions
00:06:49.960that we've really parceled out to corporations and governments and different things over the years.
00:06:55.900but there are many things that are available to us, available to men, if they want to lead their
00:07:01.180families in this way. And eventually that kind of culminated into me looking into actual vocations
00:07:07.360or trades, which is what I document in my book. And so the premise for the book is that, is this
00:07:13.200exact thing. What can families do together in this day and age and build something that will last,
00:07:20.160not something that's going to be cancelable, like you described, which is like the modern iteration
00:07:25.980of where we're at. But also that would have some measure of insulation against just supply chain
00:07:33.040issues and technology innovation and disruption. My whole field of technology is one of constant
00:07:41.400change. Everything is going obsolete all the time. So you've got to reinvent yourself continuously.
00:07:46.220you know nobody used to live that way we would have family businesses that would pass on from
00:07:53.440the father to the son to the grandson and they would go for generation after generation they'd
00:07:58.800get better and better and so there this is a modern reality that we live in and it's really
00:08:06.000a false reality we were not designed to change careers every couple of years for their entire
00:08:12.280lives. We were designed to get really skilled into a few select areas and then to be broad
00:08:19.580generalists in a lot of areas so that you could build your own shelter. You could grow your own
00:08:24.860food. You would live in communities of people who did that same thing. So anyway, this kind of
00:08:31.100coming back to cancel culture is whatever the threat is, if you don't have families that are
00:08:36.920self-reliant and if you don't have them living together in communities that are self-sufficient
00:08:41.740or self-reliant, you're not going to be able to resist whatever tyrannies want to come down the
00:08:47.960pike. And they will come. So at our founding in our country, we had 80, 90% of the population0.63
00:08:58.200were farmers, which means they were all self-employed. They didn't have employers.
00:09:03.660Who was going to cancel them? They couldn't be canceled. And by the same measure, you'd had a
00:09:10.000natural restraint on tyranny. So whatever the government had in mind to do, they were naturally
00:09:14.940restrained because the people didn't depend on government and they didn't depend on corporations
00:09:19.540who can, you know, as we're seeing with the vaccine mandates, they can parcel out whatever
00:09:24.680the government wants. So anyway, there's a whole lot of layers there, but the bottom line is to
00:09:31.880become more self-reliant really insulates yourself from all of the above. Man, that is helpful and
00:09:39.900convicting. Because I'm like your past self. It sounds like you're not there anymore. So
00:09:46.520praise God for that. But yeah, I just feel like, man, if we were in a post-apocalyptic world,
00:09:52.780I feel like I'd be dead. I've never really been that handy. And that's just not really where my
00:10:01.580interests were. I like the outdoors and those kinds of things. But as I got older, I was like,
00:10:06.180when I was younger I loved those kinds of things and you know I enjoyed hunting and guns and those
00:10:11.700things and as I got older I just lost interest you know and and so anyway so all that being said I
00:10:17.820feel like a lot of men today just have not exercised or sharpened those kinds of skills
00:10:24.080like when it comes to gardening or you know growing crops I wouldn't know the first thing so
00:10:28.520well let me let me follow up on that because a lot of men today were not raised by men
00:10:34.280or at least men who had this kind of broad knowledge. They were raised by specialists.
00:10:40.740I mean, in the sense that their parents were specialists in one vocation or another,
00:10:44.900and they didn't really have a broad skill set to pass on to their children. That's a new phenomenon.
00:10:50.580My wife and I, you know, we call ourselves first-generation farmers, and there really
00:10:55.660hasn't ever been a first-generation farmer up until recently, until you go all the way back
00:11:00.660to Adam. Right. Right. In the sense that we're having to learn everything from scratch all over
00:11:06.460again, because our parents were farmers, you know, they didn't teach us how to grow. And so we've had
00:11:11.920to kind of claw back this knowledge, but what we're doing is we're teaching our kids. So we have
00:11:16.820five kids and they're 11 and under, and they're out there with us and they're planting the gardens
00:11:23.060and they're digging up potatoes. And my oldest son, he's out there on the tractor with the
00:11:30.720bucket loads of manure while I'm out there with a pitchfork spreading it on the field. I mean,
00:11:34.640this is just this stuff that we do. But for me, the key thing is not how productive the farm is
00:11:40.900or whether or not we're making money or if it's profitable. It's that I'm passing a skill that's
00:11:46.040an essential human skill onto my children. They're just growing up with it. So for them,
00:11:50.980when it's their turn to start a family, they're going to have this broad base of skills. To me,
00:11:56.420that's a huge value about working close to the land or working in trades or these kind of general
00:12:02.820broad categories of skills is that you can kind of reignite that mentorship again so that your
00:12:09.060children, they don't have to start over from scratch. Right. No, that's really helpful.
00:12:14.520No, you're right. I mean, we live in the age of experts and the age of specialists,
00:12:17.720And that's part of the problem when people look to somebody like Dr. Fauci for policy.
00:12:25.120And because policy, that's what politicians are supposed to be, is you're making policy.
00:12:30.580And so you're looking at society as a whole.
00:12:34.000So you bring in an epidemiologist, but you also bring in an economist.
00:12:37.900And you bring in a psychologist, which for me would mean nothing because I think it's a bunch of bogus.
00:12:45.420But, you know, yeah, you bring in a biblical counselor, you know, like, hey, if children don't see their parents' face for a year and a half, will that have an effect?
00:12:52.920No, there's no studies that show that have an effect.0.99
00:12:54.900Well, are there no studies because it's never happened before in society because we've never been this stupid?0.84
00:12:59.800Oh, well, that might be, you know, but anyways, you bring in, you know, multiple experts and the politician is supposed to be, in some sense, a generalist who is looking out for society as a whole, who's, you know, taking counsel.0.97
00:13:12.940it makes me think of like in Israel you have a king and you have multiple counselors you know
00:13:17.180you have you know the the magicians you know which again that was not not so great but yeah
00:13:21.700multiple counselors and you're bringing them in you're hearing multiple sides of the story
00:13:25.220um but today it's like like we live in a society of experts a society of specialists and we
00:13:31.440ourselves are are so narrow and specialized in one field and and it's like it's so exceedingly
00:13:38.240rare to find someone who has you can't be an expert in everything but the generalist is so
00:13:44.040valuable today just to have somebody who has just a proficient working knowledge in multiple fields
00:13:49.980um to be able because i think that's what a lot of like where wisdom comes from is being able to
00:13:55.360to take multiple fields see how they work together and then and then come up with good policy or if
00:14:01.120you're a father you know come up with a good plan and good direction and guidance for your family
00:14:06.640And a lot of people, in the realm of knowledge, epistemology, we've outsourced that.
00:14:11.660So we're dependent on experts and with trades.
00:14:14.040And so it feels like it's just this big machine with all these tiny little cogs.
00:14:19.700And it's incredibly difficult for anybody to be independent.
00:14:24.320And so I read 1 Thessalonians 4, 11 through 12.
00:14:27.400You know, work quietly and don't be dependent on anyone.
00:14:35.500so getting real, real practical for a moment. So I've heard some guys, you know, I've talked to a
00:14:40.000few guys who are trying to go into the, you know, the independent farming kind of thing. And they
00:14:43.200say, well, you start with, you know, um, on the animal side of that, you start with chickens,
00:14:47.400everybody starts with chickens. They're cheap. And then maybe you move up to some goats and then
00:14:50.560can, can you tell us just real practical for a moment with, with crops, with animals? Like,
00:14:55.660where do you start? How does a guy who lives right now, let's say he lives in,
00:14:59.980you know, like a new build development. That's where I live, a new build development on a third
00:15:03.320acre. Like if I wanted to do this, where do I go? How do I start? So, I mean, people are going to be
00:15:10.260coming at this from a lot of different walks of life. And we get a lot of people because of both
00:15:14.760the book and the fact that we've been doing this for a number of years and other people have kind
00:15:20.260of watched what we've been doing. So we get a lot of people that are interested in moving out to the
00:15:24.740country or they're interested in trying their hand at some of this stuff. And we have these
00:15:28.840conversations a lot. One of the things is that people are at all very different starting points
00:15:34.100and there may be a season of your life where this isn't really working out. We have some friends
00:15:40.320that are in an apartment right now and they would love to be out on some farmland, but they're just
00:15:46.220not in the cards for them right now. So they're doing like a community garden plot in the summer
00:15:51.860months. But in terms of the thing that I would, I really encourage people is not to get too caught
00:15:58.900up in how do I replace my income with a farm job? Because that's actually really hard to do. I mean,
00:16:05.360farming is incredibly intensive and it takes an incredible amount of scale to be competitive
00:16:11.580at this day and age. So just thinking that you're going to put some greens in the ground and sell
00:16:16.980at the farmer's market and then be able to quit your job, it's going to be a while and it's going
00:16:21.520to be a lot of intensive operations if you even want to get there. I encourage people not to look
00:16:28.220at things in terms, especially starting out in terms of just pure profitability, but look at
00:16:33.180things in terms of self-sufficiency. The biggest bang for your buck is going to be what you provide
00:16:37.960for yourself. As soon as you exchange a commodity into money, it's going to lose about 90% of your
00:16:43.560value. And that's again, because of what we're talking about. It's the economies of scale.
00:16:47.440you're going up against much bigger operations as soon as you take your products to market.
00:16:53.240But if you can get like chickens or a small garden, and you can start to raise something
00:16:58.980that you yourself would eat and you yourself would enjoy. And then in the process, you're
00:17:04.680gaining skill. I want to go back to something you said about skill and a broad base of skill
00:17:11.760producing wisdom. That's very biblical. I'll send you some notes after the show. I can't think of
00:17:17.160bit off the top of my head, but I have the basic premise is that in the Bible, God seems to prefer
00:17:23.380generalists. When you take a look at how he filled people with wisdom in the Bible,
00:17:30.500it was with wisdom to do a broad base of a lot of things, especially in the temple construction,
00:17:36.660Bezalel and Aholiab. If you read through those accounts, he's empowering people to operate in
00:17:42.640a very broad base of skills. They were not specialists in the sense that we think of
00:17:47.600specialists, like a guy that's just going to do spot welding on this one spot all day long,
00:17:52.200every day on a factory floor. They were in charge of very broad-based types of construction and
00:17:57.800skills and all these different things. And that was one of the things that I get out of scripture
00:18:01.980when I'm reading it. And of course, reading through the Proverbs and the Psalms and all
00:18:05.600the wisdom literature, is that God really seems to, the term wisdom is synonymous with skill.
00:18:15.300And so there seems to be kind of a deeper understanding when you have a more broad
00:18:19.660base of it, rather than honing in on just a very specific area. And also that specialization that
00:18:27.160we are part of, that we find ourselves as cogs in the machine. I mean, that machine is called
00:18:32.860industrialism. That's been the whole point for the last 200 years. Since the Industrial Revolution,
00:18:39.540everything in our society has been orienting us towards efficiency. And the way you become
00:18:46.320efficient is by turning people into cogs. It's not as efficient to have everybody making their
00:18:55.280own shoes, but that's what every farm family used to do prior to 1850. They make their own boots in
00:19:03.520their own kitchens and they had the ability to do that. Well, it's not as efficient. Sure. Okay.
00:19:07.900So we'll move the boot making to a factory. We'll free up the, you know, that family to spend more
00:19:13.620time in the coal mine, let's say, and every society benefits. We'll just follow that out
00:19:18.600for 200 years. And then you have, you know, you have people that don't know how to make anything.
00:19:23.640I mean, they don't know how to show up for work on time.
00:19:28.500There's just so much of a deficit of skill and knowledge anymore because we took away the broad base of things in order to gain efficiency.
00:19:36.560So now we're in a day and age and people are finally waking up to this is that maybe we've gone too far.
00:19:44.300And there's a lot in our generation that are taking stock of things and saying, you know, I don't think it's all just wrapped up in the paycheck.
00:19:50.680there's maybe something more to life than just what I, you know, what I take home from the
00:19:57.100cubicle job or the office job. Maybe there's more that I was meant to do with my body and being
00:20:03.320physical with, like you were saying for Thessalonians, working with my hands. And I'm
00:20:09.660wanting to say, yes, there is. You are designed to do a lot of things and to do a lot of things
00:20:15.780very well. And that wisdom comes to you through that broad base.
00:20:22.320So that makes a lot of sense. But there's one thing that I couldn't help but think as you
00:20:27.940were speaking. So my brother, a lot of my listeners probably don't know this,
00:20:32.420but I have two brothers and one sister. My sister, her husband is my fellow elder in my church here,
00:20:40.300Covenant Bible Church in Texas, where we're located in Georgetown. My two brothers, though,
00:20:47.100have a very different worldview. And one of my brothers is a registered Marxist. And we have a
00:20:56.140good relationship. And we have, you know, conversations from time to time. He actually
00:21:00.500was visiting recently, and we had a really great conversation. And we ultimately, you know,
00:21:06.220profoundly disagree. And what it always comes down to at the end of the day is, you know,
00:21:10.300theological and philosophical you know fundamental ideas you know we always it's like it's like we
00:21:16.560have the same conversation and it's new and we're like man we're really getting somewhere and then
00:21:20.700it always lands at oh joel well you think that people are totally depraved and i think people
00:21:27.980are good and if they had universal housing and this and that you know they'd all be painters
00:21:32.060and artists and you know so anyways so but my marxist brother if he was sitting here listening
00:21:38.280to the things that you're saying um i think he would say well this is some of what carl marx is
00:21:44.160upset about you know like because and he's upset about that he would say yeah i hate um the
00:21:49.100industrial revolution and a lot of its aspects and these kinds of things he's you know so my
00:21:53.860brother he's actually he's a cobbler you know and it's a business that was owned by um the grandfather
00:21:59.080so he's working with the grandson now and um and his father owned it and so it started in the 20s
00:22:05.160um, then they moved into the city of Seattle in the forties, but they still have the equipment
00:22:09.880from the twenties, a hundred year old equipment. And, uh, my brother has, you know, his, his
00:22:14.860doctorate, you know, but he's works as a cobbler and does nothing really with his degree and
00:22:20.020is working with his hands and is happy and likes it. And, um, and they own goats and chickens and
00:22:25.780things like that and building their little farm. And, and, uh, and so it's that my, my point is
00:22:30.780he has a very different worldview than you and I do,
00:22:34.820and yet he would agree with a lot of the things
00:22:36.780that you were saying, and so what I want you to help me with
00:22:39.300and our listeners with, how do you parse out
00:27:17.120These are all things that biblically are supported.
00:27:20.360Where capitalism runs afoul is that there is no moral basis for capitalism besides freedom.
00:27:27.400Freedom is kind of the ultimate morality in capitalism.
00:27:30.760Well, if you have autonomous man, right, the heart is wicked.
00:27:35.900The heart is deceitful beyond all things and desperately wicked.
00:27:39.080who can know it so if you have the heart of man is desperately wicked or depraved as you would say
00:27:44.500and you give that man ultimate freedom what is he going to do with it right and this is where
00:27:51.100capitalism has nothing to say about it because if it's efficient if it produces wealth it's a good
00:27:56.400thing i mean in terms of achieving the ends that of which it's set up for there are some other
00:28:01.700nuanced things real quick i would i would add to that though i think that capitalism certainly
00:28:05.680there's crony capitalism and certainly there are faults but i think what capitalism would say to
00:28:09.820that is you know capitalism is not a religion but i i think that it would say that that capitalism
00:28:15.520has competition and so there are checks and balances that are built into because because
00:28:21.400for my brother like you know he you know so here's like some of the things he would you know he would
00:28:25.560throw at you you know if he was on the show and you know he would say you know or he'd throw at
00:28:29.860me probably he'd probably agree with you a little bit more but he would say all right well if if
00:28:34.000there's a river and some guy, he owns land on the head of the river, up the river, and he chooses
00:28:40.160to build a dam. But all these other people are dependent on the river downstream. But it's his
00:28:45.740property and he has river rights and all that kind of stuff. He builds this dam and he becomes
00:28:50.280obscenely wealthy, obscenely rich. And everybody else is actually suffering because of, or saying
00:28:57.300the shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line. And if somebody happens to
00:29:03.540own this land. It's been in their family for generations. And it's not because they did
00:29:07.420anything extra or they worked harder or this or that. They just happen to be in this place. But
00:29:11.260then, you know, a hundred years down the line, great, great grandchildren, you know, the two
00:29:16.720cities that pop up here and pop up here and their populations, you know, explode and you own the
00:29:22.720land right in between, or you just own land, not all the land, but just land in that straight line
00:29:28.700between point A and point B, these two cities, um, that land is going to be incredibly more
00:29:34.420valuable than other land. And it's not because it has some special flower that grows in that
00:29:38.660portion, you know, the land with, you know, medicinal property. It's just, you just got
00:29:43.100lucky, right? You're at the head of the, you're, you're up here at the head of the river, you're
00:29:46.360down here, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, and, you know, so he, he would kind of throw these
00:29:50.900kinds of things out. And so then he would say, so you need a check and balance, right? You need
00:29:55.800somebody to come in and be able to check the you know the oligarchy within capitalism the tech
00:30:02.700giants and the you know the jeff bezos and where i would disagree with him is you know because his
00:30:07.880solution is the state and i and i would say but so so your view is that the capitalist ceos
00:30:15.840are corrupt and will exploit people um but the state won't you know so so my for me it's just
00:30:24.760like they're all corrupt like putting on a police hat or putting on you know a domino's delivery hat
00:30:32.240or like whatever hat you're wearing whatever role you're in whether it's a civil role or whether
00:30:36.120it's in the private sector the heart of man is still the same so to me i i feel like there are
00:30:42.300more i think there are more checks and balances within the capitalistic economic system than then
00:30:48.780i think there might be in our government what what do you think you don't even have to speculate on
00:30:53.220that because we have 200 years of history to see what the result of Marxist theories were. I mean,
00:30:59.020within 140 years of the publishing of the Communist Manifesto, a third of the world was
00:31:06.060under communist rule. And so we've seen the millions and millions of people, I mean, the
00:31:12.260hundred million people that have died mostly of mass starvation coming out of Marxist theory.
00:31:18.340So it doesn't matter that Marx identified some faults with capitalism.
00:31:25.620What he projected into the world was far more catastrophic and evil than anything that came out of, you know, Wealth of Nations and Rand or whatever.
00:31:39.660And so and I would agree in the assessment is that capitalism can certainly coexist with biblical law.
00:31:48.340It just has to be subordinate to biblical law.
00:31:51.300I think that's where what we see right now is where a lot of the rails are coming off or where the train is coming off the rails in the American society is we have abandoned God's law as a source of moral authority.
00:32:05.540And when you do that, you know, going back this, of course, this is stuff has been happening for a long time, but you can see how each successive generation, the capitalism exploits the morality of that generation to achieve its ends.
00:32:22.540And so now we have America, which, you know, used to stand for something more noble and good around the world.
00:32:29.060We're the ones exporting pornography and Hollywood and all of this divisive agenda that's coming out of very progressive leadership.
00:32:39.100This stuff is being exported by America to the rest of the world.
00:32:43.040Right. We're the ones doing that. That's capitalism working itself out.0.94
00:32:46.340And so the key difference there is that you can certainly coexist, but capitalism in and of itself is not a moral authority.
00:32:54.860It has to operate inside the boundaries of another authority.
00:32:59.340So back to your point, as I agree exactly, is that the Bible teaches that man is inherently evil.
00:33:31.500They're the most egalitarian society in the world.
00:33:34.240I think the average wage is something like $17 a month.
00:33:39.100I mean, it's like it's impossibly, impossibly low this late, you know, at this stage in the world history for as long as they have been trying that experiment.
00:33:49.200But you have corrupt people in charge and they will always act corruptly.
00:33:54.260They will always prevent actual prosperity from coming.
00:34:05.880And that was really helpful and makes a lot of sense because ultimately what you're saying is the same thing that I would say is that, you know, for the Marxists, there's the corrupt capitalists, the greedy capitalists, you know, like they would make an argument.
00:34:19.700I mean, some of the arguments we would agree with, like, so, you know, like they would look at a CEO and then look at, you know, a laborer and say, you know, like capital, the idea of capital liquidated.
00:34:28.560Like there are profits, but the idea of liquid capital that belongs to the owner rather than the laborers who actually are doing the work and producing, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:34:40.160And they would look at that and they'd say, this CEO makes 200 times what the input, like, okay, this person may have started the company, you know, or this person might be, might have, I don't know, like, you know, 20, 30, 40 points higher IQ.
00:34:56.480this person might work um might work double the hours like but by all those metrics all right
00:35:02.040they work twice as much but 200 times the salary they have twice the intellect 200 times the salary
00:35:08.620you know like and so at every and i think that's what you know the you know marxism and every they're
00:35:14.480all just different forms of egalitarianism that's the big and egalitarianism ultimately in order to0.67
00:35:19.560be consistent it becomes androgyny right that's why the whole transgender craze and all you know0.81
00:35:24.400you have to steamroll from gender, from this, from that.0.99
00:35:39.540But hierarchy can be perverted to where it's 200 times a person at the time.
00:35:43.760Because the biblical model of hierarchy is that the husband lays down his life.
00:35:48.540And I think that's what you're saying.
00:35:50.520And I think that like why we have to get back to the family, because you don't have the picture of Christ in the church with CEO and laborer.
00:35:58.720You just that dynamic, but you do with husband and wife and with children.
00:36:02.920And so at the end of the day, it's, I think capital, I think capitalism as an economic system fits within the biblical mold better.
00:36:12.060although you're right there are flaws and has certain by default built-in checks and balances
00:36:18.220through competition but only to to a point right because like for for all the capitalists out there
00:36:23.940myself being one how in the world do you compete with facebook and and twitter and you know like
00:36:31.060we try right so parlor we got them you know and then oh but we don't own the servers we're gone
00:36:48.720But honestly, I'll just be honest and confess, I'm not super hopeful that we're going to be able to compete with Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and these kinds of things.
00:36:57.600Because there's a certain point where you just, I mean, I think Google, like I read once, I think they buy a company like every day or every week.
00:37:06.980they buy any company that even looks like it might have the potential a decade
00:37:11.060from now to be a competitor and they just buy them and they buy them and they
00:37:14.880buy them and you know and so it's just like it's like almost at some level it's
00:37:18.800like it's one thing when someone's better they actually work harder or they
00:37:22.120actually have a unique idea but it's another thing when it's like king of the
00:37:26.160mountain king of the hill and you just you're not stronger you're not working
00:37:29.880harder you just got there first and there's something about the strategic
00:37:33.820positioning of the high ground that in having the high ground, nobody else can ever compete.
00:37:39.340And so that's the problem that we're finding with capitalism is there's certain industries
00:37:43.700and certain fields where it's like this person, yes, they had a unique idea and God bless
00:37:48.720them for that and all the ways that it has lent towards flourishing with humanity.
00:37:53.200But this is not just hard work and intellect and creativity.
00:37:57.380There's something about just the nature of this industry where nobody can actually compete.
00:38:02.220And so all that said, the governing force, I don't trust the state to govern the market.
00:38:09.540And that said, I trust the market to govern the market.
00:38:13.340I'm a big fan of Thomas Sowell and basic economics.
00:38:17.080So I trust the market to govern the market much more than I trust the state to govern the market.
00:38:40.980And the basis, the fundamental human societal building block where the law of God is instructed and taught and birthed into the hearts of men is the family.
00:39:40.240We've seen this come and go through the ages in Christianity where there are powerful.
00:39:45.980I mean, think about the think about the Roman Catholic Church and the power that it had up until Martin Luther and the Reformation.
00:39:52.640I mean, we have seen dominant, powerful world forces before.
00:39:56.520And we don't need to create a conservative version of everything that's out there. I mean, there are always ways in which we can be strategic. But honestly, these things are all going to pass. They're all just a shadow.
00:40:11.420And the Lord, what he will preserve will be those God-fearing souls and those God-fearing communities who, like you said, they stand by his word.
00:40:24.680That is what's going to last through all of this.
00:40:27.260So in my mind, things are going to crumble.
00:40:31.060And I actually think there's a cause for great hope in that, in the sense that God is going to restore righteousness in his own timing and in his own way.
00:40:41.020And he's calling people to be part of that right now and to not try to be so immersed in the popular culture that we're always trying to be distracted by who's ahead, who's winning, who's losing and all these things.
00:40:52.520I think a lot of the presidential and the whole political cycle is hugely distracting to the everyday kind of brick by brick kinds of things that we need to be doing as Christian families and building community in our churches and building more self-sufficiency so that when those things aren't there for us, when the systems crumble inevitably as they will, we actually have answers for the world.
00:41:20.600We have answers for people who are looking and saying, hey, what is it that you have?
00:41:26.220Why are you still able to survive and to thrive in the middle of a crisis pandemic and we
00:41:32.700can't even figure out what to do from one day to the next?
00:45:53.500I guess I hadn't thought too much about that.
00:45:56.860In my book, it's not location dependent.
00:45:59.940I mean, we talk about farming, but that's just one of the 61 trades that I cover in the book.
00:46:05.540And so it really depends on what you're being called into, what you sense that the Lord has for your family.
00:46:13.820Let me answer it this way. One of the exercises that we take families through is to kind of do
00:46:20.800a survey of the unique gifts of each member of your family. What are the passions? What are the
00:46:28.480gifts? What are the callings? What is your experience, background, kind of just to map out
00:46:34.800each person in your family, starting with mom and dad, and then doing it with the kids,
00:46:39.740and then try to do the math. So basically, what is this all adding up to? What is our family good
00:46:49.040at doing together? Not just what is dad doing and then going off to dad's job and mom watches
00:46:55.240the kids in the household, but as a family, what can we do together? That's what I wanted to figure
00:47:01.400out. What could we do together in this day and age that would be sustainable? And what we found
00:47:08.540out is it was a mix of things. So we're involved a little bit in farming, we're involved in teaching,
00:47:13.900we're involved in writing. And, you know, some for some people, they're, they're doing things
00:47:19.580like Airbnb, they're doing things like open up some custom blacksmithing kind of metal working
00:47:25.300shop. Some people are doing silversmithing and goldsmithing. And there's a whole number of
00:47:31.220different ways in which families can work together towards a vocation or multiple vocations.
00:47:38.540And so it really depends on what you feel called to, getting back to your question, in terms of location.
00:47:44.860There is obviously a huge benefit in rural versus city.
00:47:50.900You're going to have a lot more freedom just right on down to the zoning laws.
00:47:54.620I mean, when we moved out of Minneapolis, we moved to southern Minnesota, but, you know, I couldn't get chickens where I was in Minneapolis.
00:48:01.620And we had about a 10th acre little lot right on the kind of right, right in the southern part of Minneapolis, but great little neighborhood.
00:48:12.160But, you know, it couldn't do that much.
00:48:14.940So for me, it was a big deal to get out somewhere where we had a little bit of space.
00:48:21.480We had some more liberties in terms of what we could do.
00:48:26.920A lot of times you get further away from the city, you have lower property taxes.
00:48:30.660You know, there's lower crime. There's there's benefits. And today, a lot of people can telecommute.
00:48:37.520And so you're not as restricted in terms of having to be in the office. Now, whether that's a long term situation or not depends on your job.
00:48:47.560But I would say that, you know, rural is certainly preferable. If you want to go into farming, and I would encourage everybody to try to grow at least a kitchen garden to try to get some basic hands on experience with growing, even if all you're doing is making salsa at the end of the year, you know, just or growing some pumpkins or some squash to keep over winter.
00:49:07.980just do it because God created us to 10 gardens. I mean, that's in the beginning, that's what he
00:49:15.400did with Adam. It was the first occupation. So it's in our DNA and there's a lot of theology
00:49:19.780in the garden. But besides that, if you are interested in going into farming, you know,
00:49:24.100you want to look at other things like what's the annual rainfall. I mean, can that place be
00:49:28.340sustained without irrigation? There's a lot of props out there for a lot of farms that will not
00:49:33.420be around if, um, there's some kind of crisis. So you want to try to get into a climate, which
00:49:39.060would be a lot more, um, hospitable to the kind of activities you want to carry out with your
00:49:44.880family. So I guess that's kind of a broad answer. No, that was a great answer though. Okay. So
00:49:51.320in general rule tends to be better than cities, but then also I thought what you said that was
00:49:57.600so helpful was um just taking taking a tally of the family and not just dad and not even just dad
00:50:03.960and mom but looking at the children talking to them seeing their desires their gifting seeing
00:50:08.780what can we do together and the hodgepodge thing was was helpful you know that it could be a mix
00:50:14.040of things because at first i was just thinking man farming
00:50:17.360yeah well so like benjamin benjamin franklin right he was a statesman he was a publisher he
00:50:26.580He was an author. He was an inventor. George Washington was also an orchardist. He was a
00:50:32.020military general. I mean, these guys, like we've been talking about this evening, is they were
00:50:37.760generalists. They had a lot of different skills. And the nice thing, if you can spread yourself out
00:50:43.860across a couple of these things, let's say three, four, maybe even five different trades, let's call
00:50:49.480it, you're not putting so much pressure to try to make up the income from any one thing. So you're
00:50:54.680not trying to make $60,000, $80,000 a year from farming, which is incredibly difficult to do.
00:51:00.460But maybe you could make $10,000 a year from breeding animals and selling sheep. One of the
00:51:07.680things we do is sell purebred sheep. And so maybe you can raise some of your income that way. And
00:51:13.420that's a big deal. But then maybe you're gardening to the extent where you're not buying a lot of
00:51:17.780food in the grocery store anymore. Kind of a nice thing to have if the grocery store shelves are
00:51:23.400going empty. Besides the fact, whether or not you're getting paid for it, these are some nice
00:51:28.640things to build into the system, bring the supply chain back home. So there's these advantages to
00:51:34.360just having a more broad skill set. And you also don't burn yourself out trying to ramp up so
00:51:39.040heavily in just one area. So that's kind of the more having a mix of trades approach.
00:51:45.260Yeah, that's really helpful. All right. Well, let's go ahead and land the plane. Do you have
00:51:49.180any final words? I'll give you the final word. Oh man. I mean, I think, you know, God created us
00:51:56.280in the garden as families, right? He took Adam and Eve, put them in the garden and he put them
00:52:04.020to accomplish something together. And I think the degree to which wherever you're at today,
00:52:08.800and I know there might be a lot of guys that are in a situation where they can't just go out
00:52:12.820and buy a farm or they can't, they just have no ability to start doing this stuff.
00:52:17.480But I think the key thing is to start thinking covenantally as a family, as the head of the household, if you're a dad, if you're the mom starting to think of what you can do with your husband to team up with your husband to do something together as a family.
00:52:34.880And I think that that's where the blessing is.
00:52:36.640So to the degree you can do things with your children, involving them in your important tasks, not just meaningless chores to keep them busy, but actually important tasks for the family.