The legal matter my family has been living through has led my wife and me to reevaluate what is most important in our lives.
Uncertainty has a way of narrowing the field. Things that once seemed urgent begin to look temporary. Other things become harder to ignore: our health, our daughters, our marriage, our faith, the people around us, and the limited amount of time we have together.
Somewhere within that process, Josie and I both began to feel that God was calling us toward a different way of living. I do not yet know everything that means. I am hesitant to describe a calling as though it were a completed plan. But it has caused us to question some of the assumptions around which we had organized our lives.
I am not asking these questions from outside the system.
I have spent much of my adult life building businesses, working with technology, and designing systems intended to make work more efficient. I still depend on the same economy I am questioning. We need income and we buy food we did not produce. We rely on infrastructure, businesses, vehicles, stores, and technologies built by other people.
I am not pretending that I have discovered how to live without any of that.
I am beginning to question what all of it is for.
Human beings need food, water, shelter, and relationships with other people. There are other real needs, but the foundation is not very complicated. Yet the systems we have created to provide those necessities have become extraordinarily complicated.
Most of us work so we can obtain the things required to live. But work often takes us away from the people with whom we are trying to build a life. We sit for much of the day, sometimes drive long distances to do it, and arrange the rest of life around what remains.
Then we try to repair the effects.
We create a separate block of time called exercise because the work that supports our life often requires very little natural movement. We buy convenient food because work leaves limited time to grow or prepare it. We purchase things intended to make life easier, and then need more income to support the life those purchases have created.
None of these choices is necessarily wrong on its own. The problem may be the direction of the whole system.
A system intended to sustain life can gradually begin consuming the things that make life worth sustaining.
Food may be the clearest example.
For most of human history, food was more closely connected to land, seasons, animals, weather, labor, and community. That life was not easy, and I do not want to romanticize it. Crops failed. Animals became sick. Work was physically demanding. Hunger and scarcity were real.
But people generally knew what their food was and where it came from.
Much of what we now eat has passed through a system so complex that we cannot easily explain what happened between the original plant or animal and the finished product. Whole foods are divided into components, chemically altered, recombined, flavored, colored, stabilized, softened, sweetened, and packaged. The finished product may contain very little that resembles the food from which its ingredients began.
This is more than someone cooking, freezing, fermenting, grinding, or preserving food. Those forms of processing can make food safer, more useful, or easier to store. Industrial ultra-processing serves another set of purposes. It can turn inexpensive ingredients into convenient, long-lasting, highly palatable products designed to be purchased repeatedly.
At some point, processing stops serving nourishment and begins serving the product.
That distinction has consequences. In a controlled National Institutes of Health study, participants were given either ultra-processed or minimally processed meals with the same presented amounts of calories, sugar, fiber, fat, and carbohydrates. While eating the ultra-processed diet, they consumed about 500 additional calories each day and gained an average of two pounds in two weeks. On the minimally processed diet, they lost approximately the same amount.
Larger long-term studies have also found associations between greater consumption of ultra-processed foods and higher risks of cardiovascular disease and mortality, although observational studies cannot establish every part of the causal relationship.
I do not think it is unreasonable to say that a food system can produce things that fill us without properly nourishing us. A product can contain calories while still being the outcome of a system that is working against the health of the person eating it.
The further we are removed from food production, the less visible that system becomes.
We see a package, a price, and perhaps a list of nutritional values. We do not usually see the soil, the animal, the labor, the processing facility, the chemical alterations, the transportation, or the incentives that shaped the final product.
Convenience hides a great deal.
It also changes the kind of work our bodies perform. Growing vegetables, tending trees, moving animals, repairing fences, carrying feed, collecting eggs, preserving a harvest, and preparing meals all require movement connected to a useful purpose. The physical activity is not separate from life. It is part of sustaining it.
Modern work often separates those things. We earn money through one form of labor, purchase food produced through another system, and then simulate the physical activity that used to be contained within ordinary work.
I am not opposed to exercise. I am questioning why movement, nourishment, family, work, and community have become so divided from one another.
The same division appears in our relationships.
We may interact with people throughout the day and still have very little community. We can attend meetings, exchange messages, work beside colleagues, and move through crowded places without developing relationships in which people truly know one another and share responsibility.
Community requires more than proximity.
It grows through repeated life together: preparing food, sharing meals, helping with work, worshiping, studying Scripture, caring for children, carrying burdens, celebrating, grieving, and being present when there is nothing to gain from being there.
That is part of what Josie and I are imagining through Restore Creation.
Restore Creation is still a vision. We are not operating a farm, and we have not proven that our ideas will work in the form we currently imagine them. We expect the land itself to expose assumptions and require changes.
But the direction is becoming clearer.
We envision perennial food systems and a food forest producing fruit, nuts, and other useful plants over time. We envision seasonal vegetable and herb gardens. We hope to use ponds for water, fish, and support for the land. We envision cattle, sheep, chickens, and pigs moving through different parts of the property in ways intended to improve the soil rather than exhaust it.
The goal would not simply be to produce individual products. It would be to build relationships among the parts.
Animals can fertilize the ground. Trees can provide food, shade, habitat, and roots that help hold water. Ponds can support fish, irrigation, and livestock. Food scraps and other organic material can return to biological cycles rather than being treated only as waste.
We hope to reduce dependence on outside inputs over time, though we do not assume that will happen quickly or completely.
The work would also be shared more closely with family and community. Growing food would not be hidden behind a distant supply chain. Children could see that an egg comes from an animal that must be fed and protected. A meal could be connected to planting, watering, harvesting, cleaning, preparation, and gratitude.
People could work beside one another and then eat what that work helped produce.
One of the first structures we plan to create is the First Fruits Pavilion. We envision it as a simple, open place where people can gather on the land for worship, fellowship, Bible study, meals, and time together.
The pavilion is not separate from the agricultural vision. It is part of the same question.
What is the value of restoring soil or producing food if the result is still an isolated life?
The land is not meant to become another project that consumes our family or another business that measures everything by output. We hope it can become a place where work, food, faith, family, and community are brought closer together.
I know that not everyone can leave conventional employment, purchase land, or produce most of what they eat. Josie and I cannot do those things yet either. There are real financial, physical, geographic, and family constraints. Simpler does not always mean easier, and agricultural life carries forms of risk and labor that modern systems often conceal from us.
But I do think the question belongs to everyone.
Are the systems around which I have organized my life helping me protect what matters most, or are they quietly consuming it?
Do the things I purchase give me more freedom, or do they require me to surrender more of my life to maintain them?
Does my work support my family only financially, or does the way I work leave enough of me to actually be with them?
Do I know what I am eating?
Do I know my neighbors?
Does the structure of my life make room for worship, useful work, shared meals, service, rest, and deeper relationships—or must all of those things compete for whatever time remains?
Restore Creation is not yet my answer to those questions. It is where Josie and I are beginning to live inside them.
We do not know exactly how the vision will unfold or which parts will need to change. We are still learning what stewardship requires and what we may have misunderstood.
But I am increasingly convinced that the defaults we inherited should not remain unquestioned.
A system should be judged by what it produces as well as by what it consumes along the way.