Time Management Skills for the Homestead

Melissa: Hey, Pioneers. Welcome to episode number 337.On today's episode, we're going to be discussing how to structure your days so that you don't fall behind. Could I get an amen? This is something that I really used to struggle with and sometimes I will still find myself coming into periods where I feel like that, but the good news is that once you recognize that I'm starting to feel overworked and overwhelmed, even though almost all homesteaders are very hard workers. Knowing how to work hard is not our problem, but we need to make sure that we're doing it in an ongoing manner that is more relaxed and organized, but still allows us to get done all of the wonderful things that we want to do when it comes to homesteading.

Melissa: Today's coaching call is with Tami and Tami says, "I need help with tasks, like grinding my own flour, making bread, cooking from scratch, doing the garden, canning." Right there, right? Those are tasks that homesteaders take on and we try to do so much in our days. How do we do so without burning out, quite honestly? If that is something that you struggle with, then you are really going to enjoy today's episode. If you missed a couple of our previous episodes, what we are doing right now is coaching calls with members of the Pioneering Today Academy. So the Pioneering Today Academy is my membership and as a member, not only do you get access to all of the courses that we have, but you also get guided monthly tasks, monthly live calls, and you get an opportunity to have these one-on-one coaching calls that we then produce and you guys get to listen to as Pioneering Today podcast listeners.

Melissa: The good news is to become a member we will be opening for new members for the first time in 2022, on March 23rd. You could get on the wait list and be notified as soon as we open the doors for new members. We will only be open for a week and then we'll be closing the doors again, because we will be moving into our next members-only challenge. So these challenges that we do inside the membership help take you from point A to point B, but it's broken down with weekly support and very manageable tasks so that, just like today's episode, you don't feel overworked and overwhelmed, but you're still accomplishing everything that you want to with your homestead and with the support of both myself, but also our amazing community of others who are wanting to live the same lifestyle. So to get on the wait list, you can go to melissaknorris.com/pta. Just PTA for Pioneering Today Academy, not for ... What? Parent Teachers Association? I didn't realize that when I was naming it.

Melissa: So you can go and do that. Also, there are quite a few things that Tami and I are discussing here that you can go and find the links to with today's episode, which is at melissaknorris.com/337, because this is episode number 337. Today's episode is brought to you by Butcher Box. One of the things that can leave us feeling overwhelmed is figuring out what to make for dinner, especially on weeknights when we've had a really busy day, and maybe we didn't have any leftovers or put anything in the Instapot or the slow cooker. Well, the good news is on nights like those, I have a few meals that I can fall back on that are quick to prepare, even if I didn't necessarily think ahead. Most of the time, those involve ground beef. I always know that I can whip up some quick tacos. We can put them on ... if we don't even have tortillas, then we can even have nacho night if we've got some tortilla chips or we can even do lettuce wraps with them, create a big taco salad.

Melissa: But I tell you what, if I have taco meat from ground beef, I can make up a lot of things. Or another quick meal that I'll do with ground beef is meatballs. Because meatballs are so much smaller, they don't have to bake for very long in the oven as compared to if I was doing something like a meatloaf and at the same time as those are baking, I could cook up some rice and then do a really quick glaze, and we have got a pretty fast meal on the table. But that means that we need to have our ground beef to begin with. I will always advocate that raising your own ... pasture-raised is the important part there, grass-fed and grass-finished beef is really important. But if you can't raise it yourself and/or you don't have a local farmer or homesteader that you can get that from, the next best option is finding a place that will deliver it straight to your door, also sources from small farms that are 100% grass-fed, and getting your ground beef from them.

Melissa: But the other part is getting free 100% grass-fed ground beef. Can I get an amen? Butcher Box is doing a very special offer that new members receive two pounds of 100% grass-fed ground beef at every box for the lifetime of their membership. I have personally had Butcher Box's ground beef and I can tell you it's the only ground beef that I've ever cooked that wasn't from our cows that was close to the same quality and taste. If you have never cooked or had good grass-fed and grass-finished beef before, one time ... I was raised on grass-fed beef. My parents always raised our own beef and my husband and I bought beef from them before we started raising our own first in our marriage. As a newlywed, I had never realized that you need to see how much ground beef you have before you butcher the next year, and don't go through it all.

Melissa: Well, we ran out of ground beef early and I bought ground beef for the very first time from the store, and when I went to cook it, I was appalled. The color, the smell. I had never seen so much liquid junk come out of meat before in my life. Now, the meat wasn't bad, it was fine, but that is the difference between store bought, grain, industrial raised meat, compared to a 100% grass-fed and grass-finished.

Melissa: So when Butcher Box sent me some of their ground beef, I was very like, "Okay, let's see what this is like." I was pleasantly surprised. Ours is a little bit deeper in color, but my kids couldn't tell the difference and I couldn't tell a difference when I was cooking it. Meaning there wasn't a bunch of weird liquid or ... I don't know how to explain the odor. It's not rancid. You can just tell the difference. Once you've had 100% grass-fed, you don't ever go back. So you could get your free two pounds and every box with new members by going to butcherbox.com/pioneeringtoday. butcherbox.com/pioneeringtoday. All right, without further ado, let's hop into this call with Tami.

Melissa: Well, Tami, welcome to the Pioneering Today podcast.

Tami: Hi. Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me.

Melissa: Yeah. So share with us for those who are listening a little bit of a background about kind of where you are in your homestead journey and where you're struggling. Or if struggling is too strong of a word, where you really could use some help so that you can get further down the path to where you want to be.

Tami: Well, I'm trying to do things homemade and do it yourself as far as making soap and grinding wheat to make the bread and gardening and bringing in the produce and now canning, among modern day every day life where you kind of go back in history and go, "Well, they had a day for this and this, but they didn't have these distractions." I was sort of being lazy and wanting a ... How do you do it? What is your kind of template of a day of doing these kinds of things so that you're not overwhelmed and running backwards?

Melissa: Yeah. It's very common, especially with homesteading, because homesteading is so many facets of life. It's not just growing a garden. Like you're saying, it's not just growing a garden. Then it's, "How do I can and preserve this?" It's not even just baking your own homemade bread. It's going that step further, depending on where you're at in your journey, and it's like, "Okay, now I want to actually grind my own flour." So I feel like with homesteading versus a lot of other things, that we're going deeper each time and wanting to then take the ingredients ... just like with the soap, a lot of times when people start with soap making, they'll do a melt and pour where the base has already been done for you and formulated and you're just adding in your own scents or maybe some extra herbal oils, et cetera.

Melissa: But then you're like, "Okay, now I want to be able to purchase the lye and maybe use the lard from my own animals or maybe tallow if you're butchering and not even buying the oil. So it does quickly become something that can feel very overwhelming when you are trying to fit all of these things in. Like you said, most of us are trying to do more in a day. Because of the modern aspect, I feel like then our four mothers and our forefathers. On the flip side, it was their way of life. If they didn't do these things, it could be life and death. Where for most of us today, we're probably not quite at that level. If we don't do this, we're still going to be able to eat, where for some people back in the past, that wasn't a thing.

Melissa: So their motivation and their focus was a lot more targeted than we are today because we do have the fallback of being able to buy stuff from the store in most situations. So all of that is to say it's completely normal to feel overwhelmed at times just because of all that we're trying to do, but there are definite things that I have kind of found throughout the years of doing this, especially with having ... when I was driving and working a day job and I was commuting. That really helped me hone in and I find that I still use and block a lot of my day. Even though I am at home now, I've used a lot of those practices still. So for me, a typical day is during especially Monday through Thursday and really even into Friday, is I have pretty much really set things, and so being able to batch activities or using either batching by time if I can't set aside a day ...

Melissa: Like you said, back in the day, it was like one day was for doing laundry, one day was bread baking, they had all of the different things, going to market, et cetera. While I can't necessarily devote an entire day to something usually like that, I found that if I can take a time block and say, "Okay, I've got ..." It used to be when I was doing a day job, or if anybody's listening and you are still working a day job, I would look at when I would have to leave for work and obviously then when I got home, and I would be like, "Okay, I get up at this time," making sure I still get adequate sleep. "If I get up here, I know I have to leave by here. What is it that I can fit in this block and either prep ..."

Melissa: I might not have enough time in the morning to make the entire night's dinner or to bake muffins for breakfast for the week, et cetera, but I might be able to in the morning, if it's sourdough, then I can get my starter bed and get the dough ready to go through its full fermentation. So that then when I come home, it'll be ready for me to actually form the loaf and bake, for example. Sometimes I would have enough time and I'm like, "Okay, I actually have enough time here if the night before ..." So really it comes down to prepping and planning, but just for some tangible examples, especially at canning time. Because I would look and be like, "Okay the night before," if it's for peaches example and I need to peel them all, "Well, I can get them all, blanch the peels off and pitted, and then I can put them in some lemon juice and water so that they don't turn brown on me."

Melissa: I can put those in the fridge until the morning, for example. Or I could make up the syrup that I'm going to be using. I usually do a really light syrup with peaches. I don't do straight water. You can do straight water, but I found I like doing a light syrup. I feel like it just preserves their color and flavor a little bit better long term on the shelf. So I can make up the syrup the night before, so then in the morning I don't have to measure or make that up. I just have to bring it back up to temp. I just have to put it in the pot, get it at a boil and then I can can that for the day.

Melissa: Same thing, I would have the water bath counter out, filled with water, all of my jars ready to go. So in the morning, all I had to do was get them hot and turn on the canner just to save the at time. So I found any type of prep work that I can do either the morning of or the night, if I don't have time to do it during the middle of the day, which I didn't back then. I still kind of stick to that during the week. I really feel that where I used to really fail, and I think a lot of us do this, is I tend to overestimate how much can actually get done in a day or in a time. So I'll think like, "Okay, I'll make up a list. I've got all of these things that need to be done," and then by the end of the day, I maybe only got to three or four of them and I would still have maybe another four on the list and I would really beat myself up or really feel irritated with myself.

Melissa: Like, "Gosh, you just didn't get everything done." I was sharing this one day with my, my mother. I had went to Bible study, we were driving to Bible study together and I was telling her, I'm like, "Man, I just can't seem to get all this stuff done in a day," and she's like, "Well, what did you do didn't do today? What was on your list that you didn't get done? Or what did you try to do today that you didn't accomplish?" So I start listing out all of the things that I'd wanted to get done that day and then I told her, "But I only did X, Y, and Z." She just started laughing. She said, "You realized nobody could actually get all of that done in a day?" I'm like, "Oh. Really?"

Melissa: Sometimes it seems so silly. You'd think that we could see that for ourselves, but it almost takes that outside perspective or someone making you reevaluate and look at what you are trying to get done in a day, because sometimes we're just simply trying to do too much and it's not humanly possible to do all of those things in a day. Does that make sense?

Tami: Yes. Yes. Because I was hand grinding manually because I said it's going to be good exercise for the wheat and then that's been about three years and I noticed that I wasn't doing it anymore and not really doing the bread and the whole thing, because I was not looking forward to hand grinding. So I told myself, "It's okay, you can get a machine and push a button, then have it go faster. Then you can actually ... The bread is the product that you want." So I was stumbling on that and realized that I was trying to do too much and I need to have the convenience of modern day and that it's okay.

Melissa: Yes. 100%. I'm so glad that you brought that up because sometimes we kind of get caught in ideology of, "Well, this is the traditional way, and this is the best way." For all of those things, and that may be well and true, but if it's hindering us from actually doing it, then we've kind of missed the whole point. Like you said, you didn't enjoy it anymore and so you weren't actually making the bread. So there's nothing wrong with using a modern counterpoint, like an electric mill to grind your flour. I mean, my goodness you're still grinding your own flour and getting all of the beautiful health benefits of that fresh ground flour. So I think it's being very realistic and also finding ways ... when you do have something that you don't really enjoy that much, if you can find a way to enjoy it ... or really a lot of times what I do is multitasking can get a lot of a bad rap for a number of reasons.

Melissa: Really, if we're trying to sit and work and you're trying to do five different tasks at once, every time, even though you don't realize it, your brain shifts to another task, it has to refocus and you actually lose productivity and a lot of that. But that being said, I have found that ... well, I don't loathe laundry. I know some people, it's their worst chore ever. They absolutely hate it. I don't really loathe doing laundry, but it's not really my favorite thing in the world. Neither is doing dishes, but they're necessary evils because I like clean clothes and I like to have clean dishes. So what I found is I really enjoy listening to podcasts. Big surprise as this is a podcast. Or audio books. something like that. Or listening to music. Those are things that I really enjoy.

Melissa: I'm not much of a television person. So I will reward myself and be like, "Okay, well, you don't get listen to this podcast or this chapter in this audio book," or maybe your favorite playlist, whatever it is, "Until you are actually doing the laundry." So it's kind of multitasking, but it's almost more of a reward system to myself because I'm not really having to focus too hard. I'm still just doing the laundry. So I have one hand on task, even though my brain is engaged by listening to some form of media. So I found that for things that I don't super enjoy, if I can pair it with something I really do enjoy, then that makes it easier for me to stop procrastinating and get into it. So if you can find little things like that, where you can reward yourself, even if it's just something small, that can often be a way to at least stay consistent with things.

Tami: Okay. Well, thank you. That's very, very helpful. I like how you put in to try to find blocks of time that doesn't interfere with your every day, but that you can get small things accomplished to do the bigger thing that's going to take a little more of your time.

Melissa: Yeah. For me, that seems to work because usually what I found would happen is if I tried to ... or I should say tried to, but if I didn't do laundry and for the size of our family, we've got four people and we live on a farm. I really need to do one ... If I do one load of laundry every day, occasionally I'll have to do two, but if I can just do one load of laundry every day, then we're never really behind. That just keeps us up on everything. But I found that if I waited until the weekend or I went three or four days without doing laundry, oh my gosh, it's like an entire day's worth of laundry. Most of us don't have an entire day to devote to something. So for me, I found that it's too through with my laundry. It's true with weeding in the garden, even really with my baking.

Melissa: For the weeding and the garden, if I can just stay up on it and I can usually find about 15 to 20 minutes in the main part of summer, like our main growing season, I can find about 10 to 15 minutes in the morning or in the evening and go out and just kind of attack it. So then by the time the weekend rolls around, which is usually when we have more time at home, then whatever I didn't get to during the week, maybe I only have a half an hour, rather than trying to weed all of the garden beds on the weekend. I mean, it would take all day Saturday, and then you don't have time to devote to anything at else.

Melissa: So I've kind of found that for those types of tasks, I like to break them into just smaller daily things. But for meal prep and meal planning and especially my baking, I try to do where I have a batched ... usually on Sunday afternoons or early evening where I'll look at what we need for the week and as many things as possible that I can batch or get baked that I don't have to do later, or at least prepped and planned, that really helps me with the cooking from scratch and getting meals on the table. Now, you're an academy member so I don't know if you went through the lesson, but I have a lesson on that inside the academy. It's under our homesteading skills course and it is how I do a week's worth of baking in one hour a week of hands on time.

Melissa: So that's a lesson. If you haven't went through that, it's got some really helpful tips, and then for anybody listening, this is one of the few classes that I offer outside of the academy that you can actually watch for free. So we'll have a link on the blog post, if that's of interest to any of you who are listening. But it's really been a system that has worked really well for me. When I start to feel overwhelmed again, I can usually track back to I'm not implementing that like I used to, and I need to go back to that. So that can be really helpful if you haven't went through that one yet.

Tami: Okay. Thank you.

Melissa: Yeah, I don't know about for you, but I found for me and really in all aspects of my life, but I am not naturally a planner. I am much more a fly by the seat of my pants girl or a rough outline. Like, "We're going to do X, Y, Z today. Needs to get done." Or, "This is a project. We need to build a new herb garden and it needs to be done by planting time." That's kind of usually my natural tendency. I'm more like, "Let's just jump in." But I found as more and more has been added to my plate, both with the business and the podcast and the academy, and as we are homesteaders, we accomplish one task and then we want to move on to five others, we're continually adding to that.

Melissa: I've really found that if I will put in the work, make the time, it's not necessarily find the time, it's being very conscious and making the time to do some of the prep and planning, that I really cut off so much time and frustration on the implementation stage. Had I realized that much earlier, I would've saved myself a lot of grief. I just felt like I don't have the time to set aside for planning. I'm already so busy, or for prepping, not realizing how much it would actually save me time on the back end, on the implementation stage.

Tami: Yes. Just like planning out a menu. It's basically the same thing, but it's for your tasks as well.

Melissa: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's taking that for pretty much everything task wise, which kind of seemed daunting. But when you realize... If you just do it, just trust me, just try it. For anybody who's listening, if you're more like me, because I always was like "I don't have time for that." That was really how my mindset was for a while. But then once I actually started doing it, I'm like, "Oh my goodness." Now I make the time to make sure I'm doing it just because it really is that effective.

Tami: Also, I had listened to one of your lessons about having everything in its place and how to accomplish that, and I realized that, "Oh, everything's falling out of my drawers." Anyway, it took a lot of my mental thinking away from actually accomplishing because I had everything everywhere or not a flow, or just needed to purge, so to speak, in which I recently did. Now I feel like I can concentrate just on now implementing, like what you're saying, the task at hand and putting them into smaller bits and pieces now. So that is also something that I needed to accomplish and I think that is also helping me on this journey, I think.

Melissa: Oh, good. Yeah. Because of the, like we were talking earlier, the modern homesteading aspect, because we live in a modern world, and I know for those of us who are really focused on homesteading or aspects of homesteading that we do forget that we're living in a modern world. What I mean by that is most of us do have a smartphone or a cell phone. Now, yes, we can put those in do not disturb mode and have specific times and set guidelines around that and all of that, but most of us are using computers. We are using technology and all of that and every time your phone makes a ding or every time your eye is in a room and there are things that are out of place, we don't realize that our brain is making a decision one way or the other if it needs to immediately do something with that.

Melissa: So even though your phone might give off a notification and you don't actually go over and check it or open it up and respond to whatever that is, or you walk into a room and you're like, "Yeah, there's stuff on the counter that I need to clean," you don't realize all of those are mental decisions and they actually use up our energy throughout the day, and we're only capable of making so many decisions in a day. We don't realize that all of that adds to our overwhelm. It interrupts our ability to focus, even if we're not consciously being ... we don't realize it. So for me, when I realize that, just like you're saying, anything that I can do to stop having to make so many decisions is so helpful.

Melissa: Not only being able to find things ... I don't know how many of you ... Myself, I think I've went to do a project and then you can't find the one thing and you know you have it, maybe it didn't get put back in its right spot. Maybe it actually has a spot and you're organized, you can't find it, and you spend 15 or 20 minutes looking for this thing because you can't move forward without it, where you just lost that much time. It might not happen all the time, but you start to add up those instances where you can't find something you're looking for, and/or you can't find it. So then you go and buy another thing to replace it and as soon as you buy the other thing, then you find the one that you couldn't find.

Melissa: So you've got the time of replacement and the money of replacement, and so it kind of could seem silly or overly simplistic, but it is so true. If you can keep things organized and in places, et cetera, like you're discovering, oh my gosh, it can make such a big difference.

Tami: It's made a huge difference so far.

Melissa: Good. Well, are there any other specifics or areas that you have any final questions on where you would need some advice?

Tami: Well, it would be off topic, but.

Melissa: That's fine.

Tami: Okay. I have the tar hill beans and I asked this question already about my American canner, pressure canner.

Melissa: Yes.

Tami: When I'm putting on the lid ... and first of all, I think I had greased it too much. I think I didn't follow ... I think I did the bottom and the top.

Melissa: Okay.

Tami: Then I wiped up... Anyway, when I'm trying to level and attach the top around [inaudible 00:30:00].

Melissa: The lid to the base? Okay.

Tami: Yeah, and you're tightening it, I can't seem to balance it right and steam escapes. I stop and I take it off and I just have gotten discouraged. It looks very simple. I've watched your videos, I've watched how to do it. My husband will even come in and he'll do it and it works and then I can do it. But I don't seem to have the knack. Is there a trick or something to attach that lid and tighten it down evenly around?

Melissa: Yeah. Well, one is I'm assuming that ... I know this sounds silly, but I'm assuming that your burner and your stove is level.

Tami: Oh.

Melissa: I would first check and see that. Just make sure that it's level, because if it's not level, then it's going to be harder obviously for you to get it on level. If the pot itself isn't sitting level, it's going to be hard. It's going to look like the lid is not level, even if it is because the bottom of the pot is not level. So that would be an easy thing that I would check first, just to make sure that the stove top is level. I would check that and then when you're putting it on and you're setting it down that you're taking care, which I'm sure you are, to not push harder with one hand versus the other as you're actually seating it and putting it on.

Melissa: Then when you are bringing up the little wingnut screws, making sure it's always opposite pairs, and what I do is sometimes when you're starting to tighten down the wingnuts so that they're kind coming in contact with the lid and then clamping that down, sometimes when I'm tightening it, one will come in contact with the lid faster than the other. So making sure that then I stop with that one and tighten the other one until they both are just touching the top of the lid and then tightening them together at the same time so that they are pressing down evenly on that lid from all sides.

Melissa: Then making sure that it's being tightened down tight enough. I mean, you don't want to over tighten them, but I'm wondering if when your husband does it, because I have to say, my husband has better grip strength than I do and there's things that I can't get loose or tightened and I hand it to him and he is able to do, so I'm wondering if maybe he's able to tighten it just a little bit tighter and so maybe that could be part of it.

Tami: Okay. Well, thank you. I appreciate that, because I've had to ... it starts seeping out and then I'm like, "Ugh," and I don't feel like I'm undoing the whole thing and doing the whole thing. So then I end up just putting them in the fridge, which is fine, but that's not the point.

Melissa: Right. Yeah. No, 100%. When it's seeping out the steam from the side, is it a lot or just a really small amount? Does it actually feel like it's going to boil dry because so much steam is escaping?

Tami: No, but it makes me nervous. It really makes me nervous to think that it might not have enough the hot temperature. But I don't know if it's supposed to at all.

Melissa: Yeah. Next time you try it, if it does do it, hopefully it won't, hopefully with those tips you'll be able to get that down tightly, but next time it's doing it, can you take just with your phone just a little quick video of where the steam's coming out and share it with us either in the circle community or shoot me an email so I can visually really see how much is coming out?

Tami: Sure. Oh, thank you. Yes. That would be wonderful. Yeah.

Melissa: Okay. Yeah.

Tami: What I should do is just practice with some empty jars, jars just with nothing in it and just practice doing what you said.

Melissa: I mean, for a test, you could can water. I mean, I don't know that you need to, but if you need to do test runs and you're like, "Man, I would just want to test it without running any food," then you could actually can some water. Then, of course, that would be shelf stable for an emergency or something like that. But that way the jars aren't empty and you'll be able to see like, "Oh, did the jars seal right?" all of that kind of stuff. So that could be a easy test run option.

Tami: I definitely will do that. Thank you.

Melissa: Yes. Great.

Tami: That's really kind of you to offer that for me. I appreciate it.

Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Tami, thank you so much for coming on and for being a member and I'm excited because you are going to be a successful canner this year. We're going to get you through it.

Tami: yes.

Melissa: Yes. Yeah.

Tami: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for doing this and taking the time to help all of us. It's really wonderful. Thank you so much.

Melissa: You're so welcome. I am so happy to do so.

Tami: Nice to meet you, Melissa.

Melissa: Yes, you too.

Melissa: Here we are with our verse of the week and we are still in the book Ezekiel, chapter 28, verse five. This is the amplified translation of the Bible. "By your great wisdom and by your traffic, you have increased your riches and power and your heart is proud and lifted up because of your wealth." Now, this is actually where the prophet is prophesying against the prince of Tyre. I'm actually not sure how you pronounce that. I have to confess, there are some areas in the old testament, some names as well as different cities, et cetera, that I do not know what the proper pronunciation of them is. So please forgive me if you do, and I completely butcher it. But the point of me sharing that verse is God was bringing judgment against the city.

Melissa: In fact, he completely decimated it. It was a large, grandeur city and it has become an almost uninhabited pile of ruins, even to this day. My footnotes, I love the footnotes. I love historical data and when you have footnotes that go into that, but it says, "In modern times, population of Tyre," or Tier, "Made up largely of fisherman who spread their nets on its beaches has increased to about 6,000. But the city as it was back in biblical times has never been revived N the original site has long since become obliterated." Boy, I'm having trouble pronouncing and saying words this morning. The reason that I wanted to share that verse is because the reason that God brought judgment against it wasn't because it was a rich and powerful city. The reason was that the city's heart, if a city has a heart, is that it became proud and lifted up because of its wealth.

Melissa: If you read further along in the chapter, that it was setting itself up thinking that it was wise, almost immortal, that it had done everything on its own doing and did not give any credit or thankfulness to God. So even though you and I are not a city, obviously, there is a lesson here for us, and just because someone may have money or be wealthy, and of course that's all perspective because what some people consider to be wealthy or a certain amount of money is ... depends on where you're coming from is what I'm getting at. But there's oftentimes misquoted where it says money is the root of all evil. That is not actually what the Bible says. It says the love of money is the root of all evil, not money. So just because as somebody is wealthy, doesn't mean that they're bad or that the wealth is bad or that the money is bad, but it all comes back to the heart.

Melissa: If the heart is proud and lifted up, and you begin to think that it's all come to you because of what you have done and not because the favor of the Lord, and you're not giving him praise and gratitude and thankfulness, then that's when we begin to have problems. So I shared that verse with you because it is a good reminder that whatever wealth we have, and wealth of course can be money, but it can also be other things. When I have a really phenomenal garden harvest, for example, it's important for me to not just pat myself on the back and be like, "Good job," but also to remember, and to give thanks to the Lord, and as we are harvesting that, preserving it up and then consuming that food, that I am continually giving him thanks and glory and not myself and the works of my own hands.

Melissa: Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that you enjoy not only the interview with Tami, this whole episode as well as is the verse of the week, but that I get to see you inside the academy. Go and jump on that wait list and I will be back here with you next week, of course, for another addition of the podcast. So until then, blessings in Mason jars, my friends.