Open Bible on a couch with a cup of coffee in early morning light

Faith

Morning Quiet: Finding God in the Early Hours

Before my little boy wakes up and the day takes over, there is a small window of grace. Here is what I have learned about meeting God in the stillness before it all begins.

Faithful Farm Life·November 4, 2026·4 min read

It starts before he wakes up. I slip off the couch, wrap myself in a blanket, and settle in with my Bible before the house gets loud. The coffee is already made — I set it the night before, because I know myself. Outside, the backyard is just a suggestion in the dark, the raised beds and flower borders barely visible.

I did not always do this. For a while after he was born, I told myself quiet time would happen later — after nap, after bedtime, after things calmed down. Later never came. The day would fill itself up, as days do, and I would fall into bed having spoken to everyone except the One who mattered most.

A woman at our church once told me: 'Give God the first of your day, not the leftovers.' I have thought about that almost every morning since. There is something about the early hours that feels unguarded. The to-do list has not yet assembled itself into a wall. It is just me and the Lord and the quiet couch and my coffee.

My practice is simple. I open my Bible — usually wherever I left off the day before — and I read slowly. Not to get through chapters, but to let a verse or two settle into me. Then I write a few lines in a small journal. What I noticed. What I am grateful for. What I am carrying. It is not fancy. Some mornings it is barely legible.

But here is what I have found: the days I begin this way are different. Not easier, necessarily. My boy still has big feelings before 8 a.m. The laundry still piles up. But there is a thread of steadiness running through those days that I cannot manufacture any other way. It is the difference between facing the day alone and facing it accompanied.

If you have been meaning to start a morning practice and keep putting it off, I want to encourage you gently: start small. Five minutes. A single verse. A one-sentence prayer. God is not waiting for you to be impressive. He is just waiting for you to show up.

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First Frost: What the End of the Garden Season Teaches

Every October my raised beds remind me that endings are not failures. They are just part of the rhythm. This year's first frost came early, and it brought a lesson I needed.

Faithful Farm Life·October 28, 2026·4 min read

I knew it was coming. The forecast had been saying it for days — first frost advisory, overnight lows in the upper twenties. Still, there is always a small hope that the weatherman is wrong, that the season will stretch just a little further.

It did not stretch. I walked out to the backyard the morning after and found the tomato plants blackened, the basil collapsed, the last of the zucchini gone soft. The raised beds that had fed us all summer were finished. Even the flowers along the fence — the zinnias I had been so proud of — were gone.

I grew up watching my parents tend a big farm garden every year, and I still feel that particular quiet grief at the end of the season. All that tending. All those early mornings with the hose while my boy played in the dirt beside me. The staking and the weeding and the watching. And now it is over until spring.

But here is what I have come to believe: the frost is not the enemy. It is part of the design. The ground needs to rest. The soil needs the cold to break down what is left, to prepare for what is coming. The ending is built into the beginning.

I think about that when other things end too. Projects that do not go the way I planned. Seasons of life that close before I am ready. There is a temptation to see every ending as a failure. But the garden has taught me otherwise. Some things need to die back so that something else can grow.

I cleared the raised beds and tucked them in with a layer of compost. I already have seed catalogs on the kitchen table. By spring it will all be ready again — the beds, the borders, the flowers. That is the promise the garden makes every year, and so far it has never broken it.

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Sunday Suppers: Why We Still Eat Together

In a world that pulls families in a dozen directions at once, the Sunday supper table has become our anchor. It is not always peaceful. It is always worth it.

Faithful Farm Life·October 19, 2026·4 min read

Sunday supper at our house is not a quiet affair. Our little one is usually in his high chair making a mess of whatever I put in front of him, the dog is circling hopefully, and my husband and I are trying to have a conversation over the noise. In our small house, there is nowhere to escape to — we are all right there together. It is a lot.

And yet. These are some of my favorite hours of the week.

We started making Sunday supper a real thing early in our marriage — partly because Sunday was the one day we both slowed down, and partly because I grew up at a table that mattered and I wanted that for our family too. Even in our little cabin-sized house, the table feels like the center of things.

The menu is usually simple. Something from the raised beds when the season allows. A roast chicken. Biscuits, always biscuits. The point was never the food, though the food matters. The point is the sitting down together.

What I have noticed is that the table is where we actually find out how the other person is doing. Not the surface stuff — how was your day, fine — but the real things. The worry one of us has been carrying. The funny thing that happened. The question someone has been turning over all week. The table creates space for those things to surface.

I know not every family can do Sunday supper. Life is complicated. But I would encourage you to find your version of it — whatever meal, whatever day, whatever works. The table is one of the oldest gifts we have been given. It is worth protecting.

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On Gratitude When the Harvest Is Small

This was not my best year in the raised beds. The dry summer took more than it left. I have been thinking about what it means to give thanks when the abundance is harder to see.

Faithful Farm Life·October 7, 2026·5 min read

We had a dry summer. Not a disaster — I know people who had it worse — but dry enough that my raised beds needed more water than I had time to give them, especially with a toddler underfoot. By August I was tired in a way that went deeper than the heat.

And then it was harvest time, and the harvest was smaller than I had hoped. I stood in the backyard looking at the beds and felt the familiar tightening that comes when the effort and the outcome do not match up.

I have been thinking about gratitude a lot since then. Not the easy kind — the kind you feel when everything goes well and the table is full and the sun is shining. That gratitude comes naturally. I mean the harder kind. The kind you choose when the harvest is small.

There is a verse I keep returning to: 'In everything give thanks.' Not for everything — I do not think we are asked to be grateful for drought or loss or hard seasons. But in everything. In the middle of it. While it is happening. That is a different and more demanding thing.

What I have found, in the practicing of it, is that gratitude in hard seasons is less about feeling thankful and more about choosing to look for what is still good. My boy is healthy. My husband is steady. Even in a dry summer, the flowers I planted along the house still bloomed. These are not small things, even when they feel ordinary.

Next year may be better. It usually is. But I am glad for what this dry summer taught me about the kind of gratitude that does not depend on the size of the harvest.

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Growing Up on a Farm: What I Want to Pass On

I grew up doing chores before breakfast and after school. I complained sometimes. Mostly I just did them. Here is what farm life gave me — and what I hope to give my son.

Faithful Farm Life·September 22, 2026·5 min read

I grew up on a farm. That means I was doing chores before I was in school — carrying small buckets, collecting eggs, helping with whatever needed doing. Not because my parents needed the labor, but because they believed that learning to work was one of the most important things a child could do. I believe that too.

The farm is a good teacher. It does not care if you are tired or if it is cold or if you would rather be doing something else. The animals need to be fed. The work is there every morning, waiting, regardless of your mood.

What that gave me — and what I did not fully appreciate until I was grown — was a kind of quiet confidence. I know I can do hard things because I have done hard things. I have gotten up before dawn. I have worked in the rain. I have seen a sick animal through a difficult night.

My son is still little. He mostly just wants to follow me around the backyard and pull things out of the raised beds before they are ready. But I am already thinking about what I want to give him. I want him to know what it feels like to plant something and wait for it. To water it and watch it. To pick it and eat it at the table that same night.

I also want him to know where food comes from. What soil feels like. What it means to tend something over a whole season and watch it grow. Those are things I learned on the farm my parents raised me on, and I am so grateful for them. We may not have acres, but we have our little raised beds and our flower borders and a whole lot of intention.

The size of the farm was never the point. The point was learning to care for something outside yourself. I think a backyard can teach that just as well.

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The Slow Season: Embracing Winter in the Garden

Winter used to feel like something to endure. Now I have come to see it as a gift — a season of rest and repair that makes everything else possible.

Faithful Farm Life·November 10, 2026·4 min read

There is a particular quality to the backyard in winter. The raised beds are sleeping under a layer of mulch. The flowers along the house are gone until spring. The days are short and the light is low and golden when it comes at all. Even our little house feels quieter somehow — like the whole world has exhaled.

I used to resist this. I am, by nature, a person who likes to be doing things, and winter felt like an interruption — a long pause between the real seasons. I would fill it with projects and planning and a restless energy that did not serve me well.

But I have slowly learned that the slow season is not wasted time. It is necessary time. The garden needs to rest. And we — if we will let ourselves — need the same.

Winter is when I repair what broke during the busy months. Things that got neglected when the garden was at its peak. Friendships I did not tend well enough. My own heart, honestly. There is time in winter for the things that always get pushed to later.

It is also when I plan. I spread the seed catalogs across the kitchen table after my boy goes to bed and dream about what to try this year — which raised bed gets the tomatoes, where I want to add more flowers along the fence. There is something hopeful about planning a garden in January — an act of faith that spring will come, that the ground will warm, that there will be another season.

If you are in a slow season right now — in the garden or in life — I want to offer this: do not rush through it. There is something in it for you. Rest is not the absence of productivity. It is the preparation for it.

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Holy Ground in the Ordinary

The kitchen sink is full of breakfast dishes, a half-folded basket of laundry is sitting on the couch, and outside, the Indiana sky is that familiar, quiet shade of autumn gray. And yet — something shifted.

Faithful Farm Life·November 11, 2026·4 min read

The kitchen sink is full of breakfast dishes, a half-folded basket of laundry is sitting on the couch, and outside, the Indiana sky is that familiar, quiet shade of autumn gray. If you looked at my life right now, it would look completely ordinary. Just another Tuesday of chasing a toddler, wiping down counters, and planning what to make my husband for dinner.

But right here, in the middle of the mess and the mundane, something shifted a few minutes ago.

I finally managed to sit down at the kitchen table with a lukewarm cup of coffee, my Bible, and an open heart. I didn't have a spectacular worship playlist running, and I didn't have hours to spend in deep theological study. I just had a twenty-minute window while my little one was finally napping.

But as I opened to the Psalms and whispered a simple prayer — "Lord, meet me here" — the atmosphere in our little home changed. Suddenly, my messy living room felt like holy ground.

As a young mom and wife, my days can feel a bit like a repetitive cycle of chores and caretaking. It's easy to slide into the mindset that God only moves in the big, monumental moments — like a powerful Sunday church service, a weekend retreat, or a massive answer to prayer. We wait for the fanfare. We wait for the burning bush.

But lately, the Holy Spirit has been gently reminding me that He loves the quiet spaces. When I take those intentional pockets of time during the day to read the Word and talk to Jesus, it's like pulling back a curtain. I can feel the Holy Spirit's presence so tangibly. It isn't a dramatic bolt of lightning; it's a deep, settling peace. It's the sudden comfort that I am completely known and deeply loved right here in my yoga pants and messy bun. It's the gentle whisper of grace that reminds me that raising my family and loving my husband is holy work, even when it feels invisible.

The Holy Spirit meets us in our actual lives, not just our idealized ones. He is in the car line, He is over the cutting board, and He is sitting on the floor next to the toy box.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the ordinary routine of your week, I want to encourage you: you don't need a perfect, quiet house or a two-hour block of time to encounter God. Just give Him what you have right now. Open His Word, even if it's just for five minutes. Breathe out an honest prayer.

You might just find that the very room you are sitting in right now is waiting to become holy ground.

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