Homestead Abundance Celebration Tuesdays #1

“Stop waiting for what you want and start working with what you have.” — Steve Furtick

Are you waiting to launch your homestead dream till you have enough money, or you get your dream property, or your spouse gets on board?  We’ve been homesteading for 30 years, since 1983 when we moved from a city apartment to 1 acre with an old farm house in Mission, a city about 1 hour from Vancouver, BC, — Canada’s third largest city.  For 20 years we did the long commute to the city, homeschooled our 3 children, and learned the homestead skills necessary to quit the day job and move to rural paradise and Joybilee Farm — a 140 acre homestead with a log house and a lot of work.  Now after 30 years of homesteading, 8 of that homesteading full time, I’ve learned a few things.  If I waited till we had 140 acres and the day job was history, we would still be living in the city.

You can start living you dreams today, right where you are.  It starts with changing your mindset and looking at the abundance that you have rather than waiting for what you don’t have.

4 qualities of Homestead Abundance

1.  The abundant life is not about money.

We made more money living in the city but we also spent it faster. On the homestead it takes longer to earn the money but the money is slower to spend.  Homestead money is SLOW money, and like slow food, and slow clothes, it is more valued.

2.  Homestead abundance consists of many things that you can’t record on your tax return or put in your bank account.

Every day there is some abundance that we are grateful for.  At first we didn’t see this.  At first we looked for cash flow and if we didn’t have cash flow it meant that we were failures as farmers and homesteaders.  What a crock of bull!  Homestead success and homestead happiness is measured not by your bank account, but your satisfaction and contentment in your lifestyle and by the good that you can do for others through your life.

3.  In 30 years of homesteading both with and without a day job, we never lacked any good thing.  God supplied every need, but not always in the way that we thought He would.

Joybilee Farm is a fiber farm and fiberarts studio.  We are “fiberartists that grow our own medium”, as it says on our brochures.  About 4 years ago, we participated in a Studio Tour at Joybilee Farm.  We had invested a lot of volunteer time in the studio tour to make it a success — putting out signs, coordinating with other artist studios, writing press releases, creating graphic ads.  On the day of the studio tour we had quite a few visitors.  But after 2 days and about 10 hours of meeting the public we had not made a single sale — not even 1 bar of goat’s milk soap.  A few visitors had even picked up items from the studio gift shop and brought them to the cash register, only to become distracted and put them down before leaving the farm, empty handed.  After all this time of listening to God teach us intimately about his will and his ways, we were suspicious and thought “God is trying to teach us something important.”  Mr. Joybilee and I got together and compared notes.  We decided that whatever the lesson was, we needed to learn it quick, so that God could let us make at least 1 sale for this huge weekend.  So we prayed and asked God to show us whatever it was he was trying to say to us.  Mr. Joybilee had a eureka moment.  We had been expecting that the studio tour would meet our needs!  And God wanted us to know that He, and He alone was the source for everything we needed for our lives.  We could depend on his loving kindness and merciful provision.  Period. Even if no one bought a single thing, our needs would be supplied by God, and if we made a 100 sales over the two day weekend, God was the source of those sales, too.

The studio tour was over at 5pm and at 4:50 pm a group of 6 ladies drove up, all the way from Vernon.  And every one of them bought something!  We learned an important lesson in trust.  And we started thinking about money and cashflow in a new way.

Mr. Joybilee started a new day job, about 10 minutes from the homestead on November 1st, this year.  This is how I know that the world isn’t going to end on December 12, 2012.  Greenwood City needs Mr. Joybilee, right now.  This is his first full time job in 8 years.  As we look back, we didn’t lack anything while we were homesteading full time and getting all our sustenance and income from our homesteading ventures.  Our income was well below the poverty line, yet God supplied every need, including 2 years of college tuition for our youngest child.  When we stopped looking for the dollar signs, we started seeing the homestead abundance that God supplied every day.

4.  Homestead abundance flips the switch and renews your mindset.

On my facebook page I’ve been recording my own homestead abundance every evening and I’ve asked you to list your homestead abundance, too.  It is amazing what looking for your abundance does to transform your outlook.  So instead of seeing “gloom, despair, and agony on me,” when you think of all the work that you still have to do, and how much you still need for winter, or to complete your preps, instead, you begin to think of the abundant harvests, abundant time, and ample provision that your homestead lifestyle gives you, right now, where you live.  Even if your abundance consists of a city apartment and sprouts in jars by the kitchen window, looking for your homestead abundance flips the switch and changes your mindset.  And with your mind renewed you are better able to move forward and make progress on your homestead dreams.

This is a blog hop

Welcome to Homestead Celebration Tuesdays, this is a blog hop! If you are a blogger, please feel free to link-up and share as many posts as you would like pertaining to:

• Urban or Rural Homesteading
• Anything DIY
• Cooking from scratch
• Preparedness/Survival
• Repurposed Projects
• Upcycled Frugal Finds
• Animal Care
• Natural Gardening Tips
• Herbal Remedies
• Green Cleaners and cosmetics

Anything that speaks to you of your homestead abundance,  that you think will build and encourage our community.

I will share my personal favourites on my Facebook page this week.  And next week I’ll pick 3 posts to feature right here.

It’s Time To Share Your Posts

Bloggers, use the linky tool on the bottom of this post to share your best post about your Homestead Abundance. Non-bloggers, feel free to add a comment here with any ideas or thoughts you have concerning homestead abundance. Every week I will be featuring the most viewed posts so link-up your best ones 🙂

When linking your posts, there are only a couple simple guidelines I’d like for you to follow:

1. Please link your posts back to this blog hop.  Linking back here helps build our community by sending your readers to all of the other shared posts.  Grab the button below by installing the html into your post or create a text link somewhere in your post.

2.  Link to a specific post and not just to your blog’s homepage, so that future readers can find your post when they look. 

3.  Please make your linked post relevant.  Don’t link to posts that are time sensitive, like giveaways, and limited time offers.

Grab my button:

<a href=”http://www.joybileefarm.com/”_mce_href=”http://fiberarts.ca/blog/homestead-abundance-1″><img src=”http://fiberarts.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Homestead-Abundance-Grab-Button2.jpg”_mce_src=”http://fiberarts.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Homestead-Abundance-Grab-Button2.jpg”alt=”Homestead Abundance” width=”125″ height=”125″/></a>

Or just use a text link:

Homestead Abundance Tuesdays #1

This post was shared on:

Wildcrafting Wednesdays, Frugal Days – Sustainable Ways, Homestead Barn Hop,