The Sunday Journal: Issue 03

A weekly vlog of spring at Havenwood Manor

Welcome to The Sunday Journal. Published every other Sunday, this column chronicles our life building a family & legacy in rural Missouri.

This entry of The Sunday Journal is in video form 😍 (and a day late)!

I was thinking the other day about how here in the U.S., we spend thousands of dollars on getting a video made of our wedding day, but then we stop there.

Yes, a wedding is a special, once in a lifetime event for some couples, but it's just one day. Most of our lives are lived out in the mundane, ordinary moments, and yet, aren't those moments just as worthy to be documented and watched over and over again years later as a reminder of where we used to be?

I have thousands of photos and video clips saved on my phone and backed up to my Dropbox, but there's something so special about a video of clips telling a fuller story. No scrolling or tapping. Just watching, with the occasional, "remember when?"

Because once I pass away, I don't know if my kids will have access to my Dropbox or my phone contents. At the very least, they'll have the printed photos in the albums and hopefully what I've shared online (note to self to somehow document in our estate paperwork how our Dropbox backups can be accessed!).

The other weekend, my brother helped Daniel fix a wall and door that were broken at the seed house. As I watched the building being made right, I wanted to tell them to stop so that I couple capture the before.

Sometimes, it isn't until the moment is gone and everything's shifted and changed that you wish you could go back in time to what was, even the imperfect, hard moments so that you can track the progress of how things used to be.

It's that way in parenting. Our babies are babies until one day, they're a toddler. And then you blink and they're little independent people who don't need you as much as they seemed to yesterday. You love to see the growth but also yearn for what used to be.

I hope these videos help capture the now. What life is like for our family in this season. Because everything seems to be changing, shifting and growing by the day, and this is my way of trying to capture fleeting moments.

I want our kids to look back and see where it started — when we showed up with faith and built something from the ground up.

So, here's a peak at scenes from a week in our life right now 🤎