Hey guys, welcome back to the Roots and Refuge podcast. My name is Jessica Sowers. I am your host. My friends call me Jess, and I hope you will too.

And here on our podcast, we talk about the homesteading life, gardening, raising animals, generally just growing food, what to do with the food,

preserving it, storing it, food security, sustainability, community, raising a family in a mindful way,

as well as many other topics, just whatever we kind of stumble into in conversation.

My husband, Jeremiah, and I are homesteading on 27 acres in the Midlands of South Carolina,

and we've been sharing our journey through social media for about the last 10 years on our

YouTube channel, namely Roots and Refuge Farm. And now we also have a blog. That's roots and refuge.com.

You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and here on podcasts. Today I want to film one of these podcasts that frankly is

uncomfortably vulnerable for me. I have had a purpose in my heart for many years before

we did social media. I read a book when my children were very small

called Finding Your Purpose as a Mom. It's kind of an older book. I have not read it in years now,

so I'm not even necessarily sharing this as a book recommendation because I'm not 100% sure

if I read it now, I would even fully agree with it,

but maybe I would. I don't know. It's just been a long time since I read it. And my kids were

really little, and I had such a deep desire to make an impact in the world. And I had a mentor

in my life at that time who had raised children and her great encouragement to me was to turn my

focus inward to my family, to my home, to my children, and invest myself there because that was

my greatest opportunity for impact. She was completely right in that. And she shared this book

with me. I read it.

And part of one of the prompts, if I remember correctly in this book, was essentially to pray and ask the Lord, what is my purpose as a mom? And I did that. And I remember praying over the course

of this period of time of reading this book.

And in that praying period, I kind of received a couple of things. One was a scripture,

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