From Winter into Spring

There are seasons in life that do not look productive from the outside.

Winter is like that.

Winter looks still. However under the surface, winter is doing its own kind of work. A season of stripping back, waiting, enduring, of letting what has died truly fall away. It is not the season of harvest, not even the season of visible growth. It is the season of grief, preparation, and trust.

This past winter felt that way for me.

Leaving my job was not just a career move. It was the loss of who I thought I was. More honestly perhaps, it was the loss of who I had become while trying to carry responsibilities I was never meant to center my life around. There was grief in that. Real grief. A laying down of identity, certainty, and the false comfort of knowing what came next.

Winter became a season of reckoning.

A season of asking God what was really being removed, and what He was preparing in its place.

And now spring has come.

Out here, spring means preparing the soil. It means clearing, turning, planting, making room for new life. You do not harvest in spring. You commit. You put your hands in the dirt and trust that what is planted in faith will grow in time.

That is what this season feels like for us.

For the last few months, an abandoned factory building has been lying heavily on my heart. It is not enormous. It is not glamorous. But it is close to our farm, right in the middle of our local town, and I could not shake the sense that it mattered.

So I prayed.

I checked my heart.

Was this pride? Was it ambition for ambition’s sake? Was I just trying to prove something after walking away from the last season? Or was this something quieter, steadier, more rooted than that?

What I kept coming back to was this: it felt like an opportunity to plant another set of roots right where we have been planted.

Not to escape. Not to perform. Not to build something detached from place, but to go deeper into it.

After nine months of praying, fasting, planning, and wrestling through the weight of the decision, we signed the paperwork for the new FarmSmith headquarters.

That sentence feels both simple and heavy, because it is not just about a building.

It is about stepping into a new season. It is about taking what winter prepared in us and beginning to plant it in public, creating a place to grow, to experiment, to deepen the work, and to open our hands to the people right next door. It is about making room for new work, new ideas, new tools, and new relationships. It is about saying yes to the place we have been given.

I have come to believe that part of faithfulness is learning how to recognize the seasons of your life. There is a time to grieve, a time to wait, a time to search your heart, and there is also a time to plant.

Spring is not louder than winter, but it is more visible, and that is where we find ourselves now.

Moving, building, preparing, beginning again.

We are stepping into a new home for FarmSmith, one that we hope becomes more than just a workshop. A place of making, yes. A place of growth and experimentation, yes. But also a place of connection. A place that belongs not only to the work itself, but to the community around it. A place with roots.

We will be capturing the move and the buildout for the FarmSmith YouTube channel, and I would love for you to follow along as this next chapter unfolds.

Winter had its work but now it is time to plant.