The Plain Values Podcast EP #11 – Josh Thomas on Building a Healthy, Free, and Secure Life

Josh Thomas:

It looks like everything is going to fall apart. Brought a trailer, a load of stuff. Never seen it. Are you joking? Been up here? No, no. I just went ahead and threw stuff in the trailer. We got on Craigslist looking for rentals and so God brought us on this place of wanting to live ourselves and teach our kids to be producers, not consumers first. Right. And of course, all that means for those of you listening is that we produce more than we consume.

Marlin Miller:

Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend Josh Thomas from Upstate Idaho and talk about life homesteading Family School of traditional skills in their own studio up at Bonner’s Ferry. And we talked about how they moved from Southern California, how their family’s migration to the PNW has been, and it was a fantastic conversation. It all came together after the modern home setting conference and we had a chance. I stayed a few days after and we had a chance to sit and just talk. He and I have spent a good bit of time together and he is a wonderfully aligned, solid guy. Please meet my friend Josh Thomas. This podcast is sponsored by my friends at Azure Standard. A while back I had a chance to sit down with the founder, David Stelter, right here at the table and we had a great conversation. I love the Azure story. They started out as farmers back in the seventies and I think in 1987 they began a nationwide food distribution company. And guys, they are non GMO organic. They do it right. They do it so well. And you can get a truck to drop food right in your town. Check ’em ou*@***********rd.com and tell ’em Marlon and Plain values sent you so.

Well, Josh, it is a stinking joy to be here with you up in Bonners Ferry. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, so if you don’t mind, let’s just jump right in. You and I met Deep waters. No,

Josh Thomas:

No, not tiptoeing in. We’ll go tiptoe in the river this afternoon. How’s that? Water? Might be a little cold.

Marlin Miller:

That sounds like blast.

Josh Thomas:

And it’s like

Marlin Miller:

90 degrees out here.

Josh Thomas:

Yeah, we’re going to enjoy the river here a little bit later

Marlin Miller:

Today. It’s going to be great.

Josh Thomas:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

You and I met in Coeur d’Alene I believe, two or three, I think three years ago for the first time, something like that. There was something, and I’m not even sure if I could put a finger on it, but you and I connected talked and I think inside the first five or 10 minutes you were like, were a skater and skate SoCal.

Josh Thomas:

It’s a SoCal thing. I know you didn’t spend a lot of time there, but it was like, man, SoCal left a mark on you. I get it, I got it.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. I was only there for a couple weeks. Years

Josh Thomas:

Ago. Yeah, well there was just a couple days years ago. Oh yeah, yeah. Long, long time ago.

Marlin Miller:

But you and Carolyn both grew up in Southern California.

Josh Thomas:

We did, yep. Yep. I was inland Riverside County and between the mountains and the flatlands, Carolyn got started on the beach. Her parents lived out toward the coast and eventually as the kids were getting older and they wanted to get out of the city, moved up in the mountains where I had settled

Marlin Miller:

As well. What kind of childhood did you and Carolyn have?

Josh Thomas:

Oh man. Vastly, vastly different. Carolyn had a very stable home and her dad was a financial advisor. Her mom stayed at home, raised the kids, very middle, upper class, and just a solid kind of standard upbringing. I think I had a very, very broken and wrecked childhood. My mom and dad divorced when I was three. I was around a lot of dysfunction, a lot of addiction, and all of my youth teenage years and even early twenties were

Surrounded by that. But yet I had this mix. We were divorce situation. I’m in and out of grandpa and grandma’s house as well, living with mom. Grandpa was a preacher, and so I had the gospel. I got to see Jesus up hand through my grandparents and through church. And so I had this very mixed messaging of my feet in two worlds at the same time for a lot of my youth. And that created a lot of conflict. But ultimately that exposure and even getting saved as a young boy, even though I didn’t know a long time before I got rooted and learned and knew how to walk in that God worked through them and through that situation, through those chaotic years to work in my

Marlin Miller:

Life. How old were you when you accepted the Lord?

Josh Thomas:

I accepted the Lord as eight or nine I think. I don’t know the date I remembered it was with my grandma. It was Inana, very just Baptist church IANA’s on Wednesday night, going to that for years. And somewhere I said yes, remember kneeling and praying with grandma. So as a young boy in the environment I was in, I grew up from that point on believing in Jesus. But I didn’t live for him until a long, long time later because of that duality and all the stuff that went on.

Marlin Miller:

Well, that was a question that I was thinking of right there was as a young guy seeing the brokenness in your own family, did that present this harder picture of a heavenly Father? I mean of how God fathers us?

Josh Thomas:

I didn’t even have that perspective until later. Life one, you grow up in that situation. You just know what normal is normal. My grandma used to say about the Great Depression. We didn’t know we were poor. I didn’t know there was something wrong. I knew there was something different about me, but I didn’t even know how to articulate single kid. My parents were divorced. I spent a lot of time in card houses and just around adults and not great environments, but it was just normal. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I knew I missed my dad as a kid, but I didn’t really know what I was missing or how that reflected on the father until much, much later in life. You just grow up and that’s normal. And back then divorce wasn’t, it was becoming pretty normal, but it wasn’t normal enough that other people would ask. Now I would guess people didn’t even talk about it so normal, but then peers would ask me, what is that? What is it like to be in a divorced family? So there were enough other people that didn’t experience that. It was a little bit different, but my answer was always like, I don’t know. I dunno what to compare it to. Is it just normal? Does it hurt? At the time I’d be like, no, not really. I don’t know.

Marlin Miller:

So how did you and Carol meet?

Josh Thomas:

We lived in a ranching horsing community in the mountains of southern California and kind of family knew each other. I’d done work for folks through a landscaping contractor. So there was just association. I rode horses, she rode horses. We worked with similar people and we were actually at event like a mountain mandates or something event and there and more just in a social environment. And a thunderstorm came, this is high dry mountains and you get these intense thunderstorms and we all got chased into a horse trailer. I had 20 of us packed into a horse trailer for this 15 minute rain or whatever. And a conversation started from there and a relationship grew, just started to grow at that point. And again, mutual community, little different spheres of life, but everybody knew each other and mutual community, mutual interests.

Marlin Miller:

Did you guys date a long time or was it like

Josh Thomas:

Boom right now? No, we dated a long time. It was near six years, I think, and a little time apart right before we did get married or get engaged. So yeah. Yeah, we’ve a bit younger than me and I think we’ve been together over half of her life now and a few more years and it’ll be over half of mine. That’s

Marlin Miller:

Cool. Are you 50 51? Oh, come on now. Come on. I’m supposed to go the other

Josh Thomas:

Direction right

Marlin Miller:

Now. Right now. 53. 53.

Josh Thomas:

Okay. 53.

Marlin Miller:

I’m 48, so yeah, I’m not that far behind you. Okay. You graduated high school, you went to college, and then what did you do after school? Well,

Josh Thomas:

I didn’t go to college right away. I was a high school dropout. I mean, you got to realize I grew up in the middle latchkey kid. Mom’s working three jobs to keep food on the table. Dad’s not around. There’s some story there, but that’s a totally different story. I’m alone, alone. I’m in an area where there’s a lot of drugs, a lot of different stuff going on. So I’m doing a lot of stuff by the time I’m 13 that nobody should doing

Marlin Miller:

Now. Did you have any siblings?

Josh Thomas:

I had two half brothers, but not with my mom. And so most of my growing up was with my mom, just poor trailer park, trying to make it mom’s working several jobs

Just to keep everything on the table. I didn’t understand how hard she worked at the time. And so I’m just a guy. Doesn’t really have a lot of male guidance in going to school. I’m partying. I’m into all kinds of stuff way early. I’m moving out by the time I’m 17 now. My mom, everybody had around me, had a good work ethic by 17, I’m like, I’m done with the school stuff. Moved out with some buddies even though they didn’t want me to, got a job and worked hard and kind of got out in the life. I didn’t go to school actually to college until much later dating Carolyn and her parents encouraged me to go later in life, and I was having some lung issues from all the sawdust. And so then I went back to school for a while in my mid twenties, mid late twenties.

Marlin Miller:

So if I remember right before you moved up here, you were operating a pretty hefty construction company, right?

Josh Thomas:

Yeah, that was a ways back. So when Caroline went to get married, she had a year left. Well, she was done with her degree, but she was working on getting credentialed. I had just finished associate’s degree, got accepted to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for architecture, and we just sat down and both of us realized I’m not sitting at a desk for the rest of my life. That’s just not who we were. That was the beginning of our entrepreneurial journey

Of yeah, so we got married, moved to West Covina outside of LA so she could finish her credentialing. And I started a construction company. I mean, I knew how to put up nice trim and cut boards, but I didn’t know anything about business. But that’s what we set out for. And so we started that right out of the gate getting married and then, yeah, grew it for a lot of years and grew it up until the 2008 crash, experienced our first major economic shift as a couple with kids and a growing business and a mortgage and all of that. So that was its own journey in and of itself, but that’s where the entrepreneurialism started and we’ve started several businesses since then over the last 23 years.

Marlin Miller:

So can you share about the journey to North Idaho? How did you guys get up here?

Josh Thomas:

Yeah. Well, it’s a long winding journey and I’m trying to think of the little cartoon of the guy that runs around the yard and I know it. I just can’t think of it. He doesn’t go in a straight line. And this was us and we started raising kids and I mean there’s little bits of the story out there and our first child, our oldest son now who’s married and has a baby, his wife had a vaccine reaction that kind of woke us up a little bit. Carolyn’s a deep researcher, she’s an educator, deep researcher. So she starts looking into things and we just start going, whoa, we’re learning about the food system. Well, the medical system first, which leads us to the food system and all the things. A lot of us here are well versed in today. And wow, we got to do things differently.

Well, at the same time, we’re having the spiritual journey. We’re young, we’re married, you got kids, we’re in church and we know a lot of leadership. And so she’s in Sunday school, I’m an eldership training and we’re just growing and asking a lot of questions. This isn’t probably where we want to raise our kids and settle. And so God just planted this little seed, but we had family, a lot of good things there. We had business, and so we didn’t know. We just had this inkling and over time it grew and we went through the 2008 nine crash and crisis and some serious challenges there. We got into, actually through my stepdad, we got into managing res and thought that was going to fill the gap. Well, it took over because in our area, construction just died. That led to a whole nother series of journeys, and eventually there was a moment of crisis where Carolyn’s parents got hit in the head on car wreck.

Mama almost died. Dad somehow only broke his ankles, and it was a major shift in our life. So work’s crazy. We’re having kids, parents now need help. We’re getting ready to go move to Redondo Beach for a couple of months, go take care of mom and dad and my stepdad who was managing this major business, which was large, high volume, we were doing about 40% of the work how to stroll. What’s an REO by the way? So REO is real estate owned. It is when the bank takes back the property. So foreclosed property. So of course you think in 2008, 2009, you got mass foreclosures. These banks have all these houses. They’re not in the business of taking care of houses, mowing lawns and tidying things up, and they’ve got mass property. So this is a huge issue of course in Southern California. So through my stepdad, he had worked for fema, HUD and different places. So he got all this work, and again, we started to do it as filler because construction was on the down wall. It got so busy. I started a new business working for his and grew it to doing 40% of his work and managing these properties taken care of. And it was a good thing because it kept the neighborhoods from just totally getting trashed.

Marlin Miller:

Were the banks hoping that you would do the work, fix ’em up and then they could rent ’em out?

Josh Thomas:

No, no.

Marlin Miller:

They

Josh Thomas:

Sold them. They sold ’em, yeah. And we didn’t have anything to do with that side, but we basically cleaned them up, got the trash out, dealt with the stuff that people left behind,

Marlin Miller:

Which was in that situation, if I remember right, it was everywhere. People just up and bolted.

Josh Thomas:

They were gone. Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, it was crazy. That’s a whole story into itself. But we did everything from perfectly clean, nice high rises in San Diego that were just left all spotless, clean, but full of furniture to 40 acre properties full of trash, and you got to clean it up and get it marketable. We didn’t do the marketing, we weren’t the realtors, but we came in and cleaned it up and got it marketable and then maintained it while it was on the market. And I mean, there was a whole lot. And that whole phase, even prior to the car wreck and my stepdad having the stroke where I was driving around Southern California, running crews, getting the stuff done and just realized what a hologram we lived in. It was all debt based. I just have these visualizations of the businesses realize that none of this is owned. Nobody really owns this stuff. It’s all debt, it’s all paper, the cars, all these people are driving in, they don’t own ’em. The houses I’m driving through, people don’t own ’em. The businesses we’re looking at people got, it’s really owned by the banks and stuff. And it just really woke me up. And of course, this is what these other things going on, spiritual journey, kid journey, food, medicine, I mean the Lord’s just filling our heads with a lot of stuff of going, whoa, this is not the reality we want. This isn’t a good reality that we’re in here and that we see people in. And we had started out getting married, just do the normal life. You go to college, you get a job, build a business, get a little piece of property, have the white picket fence and get the kids to school and all that. And so our world’s getting rocked in these years of really what I would say, God just showing us these different things. So all that culminated and it was just like, it’s time to go. It’s time to find something else.

Marlin Miller:

I kind of cut you off when you were talking about your father-in-law’s having a stroke. Was that the major impetus?

Josh Thomas:

That was part of the catalyst because we were digging out of debt because we had been building a construction company. I was doing the normal thing, taught to leverage debt to get there, and we had built ourselves a house and in the middle of it and had a pretty serious mortgage and everything was just on the rise, and then all this stuff crashes. So we’re clinging on, we’re tackling the second business just and God’s providing. I mean, we’re paying off debt, working out of debt, able to do it honorably, and then that happens and just it looks like everything is going to fall apart. And it did in some ways. It didn’t end up falling apart the way we thought it would, but it got crazy and we’re like, we don’t even see how this is even doable. I’d say that is an area in my life where I stepped out ahead of the Lord, made some decisions.

Ultimately he worked through it and I think he would’ve gotten us to where we were going, but we made some decisions in fear. I don’t know how we’re going to pay the bills. I don’t know this, that there’s chaos. And we’re like, okay, it’s time to get out from the house. That was the last remaining piece of debt and go start something new debt-free in a place that’s out of this mess that we can live a different life. And so that decision got made in all of that, and it happened over a period of months. I can’t just say where the one moment was, but it was in just this culmination of a year, a lot of years leading up and then a year of crisis.

Marlin Miller:

Had Carolyn been working through all the same stuff at the same time or was it a little bit off on the timing for you guys as a company? A lot of

Josh Thomas:

It in the overall journey. Yeah, I think there were some things in that area where I’m running business. She was always there partnering with me, but I’m in the lead and taking care of finances. No, and I think to be candid, there was an area where I got a little bit ahead of her and I made some decisions that I got ahead of the Lord and I learned later. She was a wonderful wife. She came along, didn’t express a whole lot of reservation that I learned might’ve been there later. And so I did jump ahead a bit really instead of like, okay, Lord, how do you want us to see through? I just like, okay, here’s dollars, here’s this, here’s this ain’t working. I don’t see how it’s going to work. We’ve been wanting out anyways. And it was really the decision to sell the house that I made. That was kind of the catalyst that let’s get out of that last piece of debt. And it was because when he had the stroke and died, we just didn’t know what was going to happen with the

Marlin Miller:

Business. Oh, he passed away.

Josh Thomas:

He passed away.

Marlin Miller:

Oh, I did. I thought he just,

Josh Thomas:

Yeah, no, no. He had a stroke. Oh, sorry. This is her parents are in the hospital. He has a stroke a few days later. And so we’re now divided because she’s taking care of her parents on, I’m trying to take care of my mom. It was mayhem.

Marlin Miller:

Hold on, hold on. So Carolyn’s folks had just had the wreck

Josh Thomas:

Nine days before

Marlin Miller:

And then your stepdad,

Josh Thomas:

We were literally going down. We were getting somebody to watch the kids. We were getting ready to head down together. In fact, I was off dropping off the boys at some friend’s house. She was off dropping off the girls. We were going down to take her parents out of the hospital and take them home and get them settled, come back, gather our stuff and actually go live near them, rent a house for a couple months to look after them when I get the call that he just had a stroke. And we’ve got serious business a of stuff going on besides just the crisis of that. My mom’s in shock and so we got to go different ways. I got to go take care of mom, I got to go kind of do er for mom for the business, be with her, Carolyn’s going take it. So it was crazy. It was absolutely crazy. And yeah, then he died nine days later in that. And so that changed everything. Wow. And there’s a whole lot of details in there that just aren’t too much to sift through here. And so we didn’t just automatically go. There was a lot to do. We should looking after her parents looking after mom, there’s this business that he was the kingpin and running, and that was part of the problem was he took on too much himself and overworked himself, but then you don’t just let the thing die. So we’re all grieving, dealing with this and trying to rescue a business that’s providing in very, very hard times. Then for a lot of people, income for 30, 40, 50 people

Spread out. And so you’re not going to just let that go. Everybody’s livelihood. It’s not just ours, but all these people in times that we’re still tough economically. So you’re fighting for that while you’re grieving. And so yeah, it was crazy until it was through that while it didn’t happen right then we didn’t just go, okay, we’re out. But it was through those experiences that, I mean one, just like when he died, I was like, oh man, okay, we got to put the house up. This is going to fall apart. Well, Lord blessed it didn’t fall apart. We did sell the house. And so that just became part of the motion that started to move us away as we worked through crisis and helped get things in place. And then it was literally over a year later from that happening, that incident of her parents getting a wreck and Jim was his name having a stroke and dying. It was over a year later before we actually moved, right? But decisions, that’s where the culmination of like, yeah, I think we’re going to go live a different life. The mayhem we saw with the fallout of 2008 and the destruction to people’s lives and the debt that we were all in and all of that combined with these other things, that was the catalyst to get to that decision.

Marlin Miller:

This episode of the Plain Values podcast is sponsored by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. When Derek from Kentucky Lumber and I first talked, one of the first things that we talked about was his story of their family and their business and how that all came to be. And what I found really quickly was massive similarities in their family stories and Lisa and I, our family story from the adoptions to the business side of things, it really comes down to Derek and his and Lisa and I basically saying the exact same thing where we basically said, Lord, if you want us to adopt and foster children, you’re going to have to bring us a bigger house and a bigger income. And that’s exactly what happened in Derek’s case. Two weeks later, a guy approached him about buying his business and his home. In our case it was a little different a couple of years later, but he provided everything that both of our families needed to live out the calling that he had put on our families to care for the children that he was going to bring us.

And I adore that, having the faith to step out and say, if you want us to do this, you got to provide the way. There’s something so great where you give. Not that we don’t give the Lord the opportunity to do something, but I think it’s especially wonderful when you have the attitude that you have to do this in a way that I can’t take any of the credit. Like it is literally so cool and so absurd in a way that only you can get the glory. I just love that. I love Derek and his family. They are the kind of people that I want to do business with. And I have a feeling you’re going to find the same thing. You can find th**@***********rs.com. Did you and Carolyn have this idyllic hope and vision of a peaceful life like you have now? I mean, did you see that already?

Josh Thomas:

We had an over idealized vision of there’s this song by this group, mom, daughters, west Ladies, you familiar with the West Ladies? You ever heard of them?

Marlin Miller:

Ooh, I don’t think I am.

Josh Thomas:

And they did a song called Green Beans in the Garden, and it’s this very idealized homesteading view. And so yeah, we had this very idealized view and I was like, I want to just put the brakes on, get rid of the momentum, too much momentum and everything and slow down and just live the simple quiet life. And it took us, so all this happened in 2011. It was in early 2011, may. It was late 2012 before we exited California. We actually went to Tennessee

And went there and started that journey and did that thing there for a while. It’s complicated. We weren’t really happy there. Mom was struggling with the business. I had kind of stepped back, was helping a little bit, but so we ended up moving back to California to go help mom and it was just temporary for six months to a year. We had property in Tennessee. My mom had bought some property, so we kind of had this thing she might retire to this is all this stuff. So we were still just working it out. But when we went back, ended up okay, we got really confirmed. No, California’s not the place for us and we don’t want to go back to Tennessee. We just don’t like it. So now what? You had no idea. And we had all our stuff in Tennessee. We went property in Tennessee and it just wasn’t for us. Whatever reason, we still, I mean I’m still asking God because God had really moved to get us there. There were some very specific little things where you just know the Lord’s speaking to you.

And I still go back and pray and like, okay, Lord, what was that about? What part of the journey was that? I’m still looking for lessons. I took some things away, but I’m still looking for what were the things I was supposed to learn there? What were things we supposed to learn there? And so we were only there for a little over a year and we came back, my mom was getting sick and came back to take care of her so we could help with the business. I got more involved with it, but ultimately we just didn’t need to stay there. I was able to work remote, but we went go back to Tennessee and we had some friends that had moved up to Idaho and we called ’em up and just like, what do you think you guys think about it? And they were like, you guys will love it. Come on up. And I got in a truck, brought a trailer load of stuff, never seen it.

Marlin Miller:

Are you joking? Been

Josh Thomas:

Up here? No, no. I just went ahead and threw stuff in the trailer. We got on Craigslist looking for rentals and people that follow our story will hear me say, don’t buy property outright if you don’t have an anchor, get to know an area. Well, that’s what we did in Tennessee. We bought property outright. We ended up losing money on that. And it probably was just our own fault. We bailed early and decided it wasn’t for us, didn’t get to finish developing it, so we had to sell at a loss. But nonetheless, that was part of the lesson, right? That’s kind of the point. We went somewhere and we weren’t anchored. I dunno that we fully learned it because, so our friends said, come, okay, great. We got friends an anchor. They love it. We know them. They come from the similar environment, mountain town and we’re mountain western Mountain people. We realized just different. That’s the best way I know how to put a label on it. And they were. And so we knew them and we knew they thought like us. And so yeah, no Carolyn’s like go. I got in a truck, we got Craigslist listings, making phone calls, got a trailer of stuff, come up here to our friends, drop the trailer off, stayed with them a little bit and started looking at places. But you call people up and you go, yeah, we’re entrepreneurs. We’ve got at the time, seven kids and two dogs and eight cats and a milk cow and 10 ducks and I don’t know how many chickens and can we rent your house? Yeah. And I mean North I Idaho is pretty cool, but

Marlin Miller:

That’s a long shot

Josh Thomas:

Rental market. Wasn’t that cool? And what was funny, I got down to two places and the first place I started with all the animals, I thought that was the bigger problem. And so I listed all this stuff off. It was like 40 acres rental, great place for us. And yeah, good, fine, cool. And then they said, okay, but what about the kids? I mean, I had seven kids and they said, Nope. I mean they were good with the milk cow, the stuff, all this stuff. Seven kids. They went, Nope. Why? I guess they’re not worried about the animals tearing up the property, but they were afraid the kids are going to tear up the house. So it’s not that the house was too

Marlin Miller:

Small or the house was great for us. It was perfect, was totally fine.

Josh Thomas:

Just as soon as they heard how many kids we had, they said, Nope, not doing it.

Marlin Miller:

Interesting.

Josh Thomas:

Okay. So it got down to one place, those 40 acres up here, an hour and a half from where our friends were. And so we’re like, yeah, man, we wanted to stay anchored close to some friends, but we’ve committed. I mean, we just pretty solidly committed Ida. We’re going to find something and now we got to talk the clock ticking and we go up this place, 40 acres and old log house, not very much room, not really enough room for us. But the price was right, kids, animals, everything. His only thing was you’re taking care of the septic system, do whatever you want. You’re taking care of the septic system. And I was like, yeah, I got it. There’s nine of us. Cool. And Carolyn didn’t see it. I sent her some pictures up a mile and a half road off the highway, half an hour out of town, which was kind of normal for us. But still, especially for her, I mean she put a lot of trust in me and taking her way out where she hasn’t seen and rented it, went back home and we got our trailers and our stuff and within a week we were up here. And what we learned about North Idaho was how many people were having similar experiences. God just brought ’em. And I’m sure there are other places like that. This is just here.

I have heard other stories about other places. I don’t think it’s just, there’s some magical aura about where we live here. I mean, it’s a really neat place. But we just started meeting people that were coming from different places of the country, passing just all these random stories of where they’re like, and we didn’t know, here we go. This is where we felt good about before the Lord. I can’t say he told us. Some people I know are like, oh, God said it’s here. We don’t know why. For us, it was just kind of a trail that led and we had peace with it before him. And here we are. We were here for a few months and Carolyn said, I’m good. I don’t ever want to go anywhere.

Marlin Miller:

It was that. I mean, that’s pretty short notice. Yeah, that’s all in.

Josh Thomas:

Yeah, I think it was six months or so. She was like, I’m good. I’m good. Whatever. If anything happens to you, whatever her language, she said something about if anything ever happens to you or if she just said, I’m good, this is where we’re staying.

Marlin Miller:

This is home,

Josh Thomas:

This is home. Now that house wasn’t home, but this area is home. And that was solidified in her. It actually took me a bit longer to get to that, but to know it, I mean, yeah, cool. I’m in agreement. Great. My wife is happy. She loves where she’s at. She feels settled. She’s got a peace in her. But for you, your heart, it resonated. But my heart just, it took me a little while. It took me a whole nother journey before I knew that. Yeah, for sure. Certain.

Marlin Miller:

Wow.

Josh Thomas:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

So now let’s jump probably a little bit forward. I mean, you went through a bumpy patch until you began homesteading family.

Josh Thomas:

So we got up here and I was still helping run business. We had a low income

Marlin Miller:

Back in California.

Josh Thomas:

Well, from there all this time, I’d still been helping manage this business, but the economy was getting better. This business was shrinking, so we knew it was a matter of time. Now we’re talking 2014, right? The crashes in 2009

Marlin Miller:

And the banks don’t have the REO.

Josh Thomas:

So yeah, it’s all slowing down. And I had looked at buying it, growing it, other things you can do. But mom wasn’t ready for that and she just kind of knew what she knew and she just had her stuff she was working through and I just helped her maintain and go with the flow until there was a point to sell it. And then we sold it to one of the other key players that took it. And so we moved up here with that, we’re getting settled, but the business is shrinking. The income is shrinking. We know it’s going to end. We’re doing our thing in Idaho. And up until this point, all the home setting stuff was all ideological, meaning it was value-based. We were doing it not because we had to economically the way we saw ourselves. We were doing it because we wanted to, because we saw the value in the food we were providing for the kids, which was one of the early impetuses, but also the value of working on the land of working together as family. And so it was all ideological and it was great. But up until that point, even moving up here, we were still approaching it from an ideological, not a financial or a half due to survive.

Well, after being here for a year, the business gets sold. We get a little bit out of that and got a chunk of savings, but it that’s done and gone. We’re homesteading. What are we going to do? We’d been here for a year. Life had been, we’re kind of settling from the chaos of the last few years and kind of got into that snapping green beans on the porch and homesteading and kind of that nice pace, didn’t have very much money. And we’re watching it dwindle and okay, what are we going to do as this thing wraps up, enjoying that for a while. But in the middle of all this and the rest of the story that I guess I’ll probably tell here, we realized that we felt this, I’d say the Lord nudging in both of our hearts that we weren’t made to just sit here and live quite so quietly and to ourselves

Not sharing. The Lord had told us, you’re going to open your doors for hospitality and you’re going to show people what you’re doing. And at that time, it didn’t have anything to do with social media or anything like that. It was just the church, anybody we met, just be hospital, bring people in. And we were doing for California, Southern California, we were doing radical things with homeschooling and gardening and raising animals and entrepreneurship, and people would just come in and blown away. And so it was a conversation to have in our home. And so now here we end up in Idaho, kind of love it in between things and entrepreneurship and business. Don’t quite know how we’re going to survive, but we’ve got a little bit of a rest. I had been real big on, I just want everything to slow down. I don’t care about

Money. I mean, I want to provide for my family. But after a year or so of that, we both felt that the Lord was like, no, they didn’t build you up to just, you’ve got some rest and build you up to just sit and hold this to yourselves and just live this quiet life. Now that’s us. That’s not me saying to the world, other people need to do things. This is just what he put in our heart. So there’s that and like, okay, we don’t really know what that means. I got to start figuring out work because the bank account’s getting, and so we go through this phase of homesteading starts to become a means for survival. We’ve got some cash in the bank, but it’s not going to last long at the time. This is pre COVID. We’re talking 2015 at this point. There’s not that much going on up here. There’s no construction industry. It’s a very, very light. There’s no industry here at all. I’m an entrepreneur my whole life. It’s not like I have a resume of this, this and that. I’ve got a resume of starting businesses, merging them. Not gigantic level, but decent, but I don’t know, what am I going to do here? So we thought, well, we’ll go back to construction and started working down that road. In the meantime, we’re eating what we grow, beans, rice, bulk, cheap grain, grinding around with the stuff we got to buy those carb things and

Dairy, everything we can grow on the land and doing good that. So it goes from ideological to like, no, we got to make every penny stretch. And so it became, again, not just ideological, but it became necessary for survival to learn how to do this well and to do it good and to make it work well on very little money. And so that’s what went on for a couple years while we figured out what to do. And while homesteading family got going, and I’ll stop there for a second. We can come back to how homesteading family got going, but I’ll just stop there for a minute where we found ourselves and it was tough, but it was good.

Marlin Miller:

The first thing that pops in my head, just simply hearing that it is obvious to me from an outsider’s perspective, it makes total sense why and how, I mean just why or how the Lord used your family took you through the bumpy patch to basically make you get good at it and then be able to go out when you finally launch homesteading family. It’s not from a place of the ideological. It’s not from a place of, well, I think you could do this. It is what works for us. This is how we do this in order to put food on the family table.

Josh Thomas:

Yeah, I mean, it’s funny you’re saying something that I may be realizing for the first time, looking at it from a different angle, as you say, that is like God gave us nearly 10 years of learning homesteading skills before we got to that patch where we had to rely on it just getting through the rest of life. And we just had this burning fire. I mean, even when we moved out of our, because we started on apartment and a balcony, and that wasn’t home setting. I mean, we look back at that because yeah, we were growing a few plants on the porch and cooking from scratch and having the parakeets because we couldn’t have any other animals, but we wanted animals. So it was this little urban thing going on little budes to a quarter acre and fruit trees and gardens and egg layers and meat chickens to five acres and expanding all that. So we’re doing all that this time, but it’s all ideological. It’s all because we want to. And even through the period of crisis, because from the time we sold that house to the time that even that we made it to Tennessee, where we really took a big leap in skillset and stuff.

We were in a couple little urban places, and I mean, I’m doing a Hugo culture garden and a kitty pool.

Marlin Miller:

Oh my.

Josh Thomas:

Just to do something. Just to do something. And so God used that time and kept that passion on our hearts, I feel like leading up to this time where we were going to need it. So I feel blessed in that. And this is just occurring to me as you say that you’re like, right, God gave us 10 years of building skills and building knowledge before we ended up in a situation where this is going to refine us in this skillset, in this life. And of course, ultimately prepare us for what we didn’t know what was coming. And in moving from this kind of hunkered down green beans on the porch, going to just do our home setting thing quietly to no, God’s got a plan, but here, let’s refine you a little bit and take this from ideological living to testing it out. How do you do when you got to survive on it? So yeah.

Marlin Miller:

So I got a question for you. I mean, obviously the Garden of Eden was a garden, right? And Adam and Eve were tasked with taking care of the garden. Lisa and I have for many years loved just this beautiful simplicity of what it does to not only an individual but a family. When you get your hands in the dirt and you’re working together and you’re taking care of animals, the whole husbandry thing, all of those things, what have you and Carolyn seen today? You guys have 11 kids. What have you observed as your kids grow up in that kind of an environment, especially, I mean, your older kids grew up in the city and then moved to Tennessee with you came up here. How has it been for you to watch them grow not only as individuals, but also as a family unit and just the strength and the closeness, all of those things? How has that played

Josh Thomas:

Out? Oh, man, there’s so many trails in that conversation. I’m sorry. Yeah, no, I got six different things going through my head as kids, seeing kids and raising kids in that environment. And I mean, I’ll start with one. The Bible makes a lot more sense. The stories in the Bible and the lessons in the Bible when you’re living an agricultural life,

Marlin Miller:

The sheep. And

Josh Thomas:

So even talking to them about things, it’s easier to lean on the Bible and go to analogy or a Bible story to talk about character trait or whatever it is. They’re just, that’s easier than say the city life. So that’s one that comes to mind. Two is we naturally, entrepreneurs went through this journey of doing what everybody else does and utilizing debt and all this stuff and being a consumer by and large. And so God brought us on this place of wanting to live ourselves and teach our kids to be producers, not consumers first. And of course, all that means for those of you listening is that we produce more than we consume. If you consume more than you produce, you eat yourself alive. It’s terminal. Now we’re in this kines, debt driven culture where they’re able to stretch this process out more and more.

And it’s defying gravity, if you will. And somewhere again, that’s somewhere there’s consequences for this because we are a consumer society, so we set out to teach the kids to be producers first, not consumers first. And so this lifestyle has helped that and helped see the benefits of being producers and what you can do, just the work ethic. I mean, you could say hard worker as well. Learning how to work hard, learning how to do good work, learning how to invest in something that takes a long time to get a reward out of, right? You don’t just go to work, get your paycheck in a week, go to the grocery store, get your food. You get these little chicks, you get these little plants. You nurture things over time. And in a longer frame, like something like a cow, you nurture it up over two years or more before you harvest it.

And so it teaches hard work to lay gratification a whole lot of value in there that’s just embedded in an agrarian life. I think one more, and that is the kids learning value. So people say, oh yeah, you got the kids to work and they’re this and they’re that, and you just rely on them to get all the labor done. No, we’re actually working together as a unit, and the kids know they’re valuable. Now we work to make sure they know that, but they’re contributing. We’re contributing together. So when we sit around the table sometimes, and especially in the early years where we were watching our plate go from one thing, we grew to two things. We grew to, most of the time, the entire plate is everything we grew, but we’re always saying, this didn’t happen without you, without so and so. You brought in the eggs for this meal, you tended the chickens.

You were out there sweating in the field on the fences. And of course, there’s lots of just great stories that we tell to each other that are binding in that, but they’ve got value in the world. This world doesn’t need kids, this modern world, it does not need children. And a matter of fact, in a lot of ways, it teaches that children are a byproduct and just send them off and put ’em into the system. So I think that the life that we’ve lived has given our kids self value, self purpose. You got all this modern ways that they want to build people up. No, I’m sorry. Our kids know they’re needed. They know they have something to offer to the world, and they know they have something to contribute to the world. What that is is different for each individual, but this context that they’ve grown up in, I’m seeing this as we’re now getting adults that they’re confident in these areas.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah, one of the best things that my dad said to me many, many years ago, I think it was around the time that Lisa and I got married was, and as I got to be a teenager and then 18, 20 years old, I mean, I didn’t get married until I was 25, but one of the best things that pop would say is, it is my job to teach you to not need me to teach you all the stuff that you need to know and be able to do proficiently as a man to provide for your family so that you don’t ever need me anymore. And the day before I got married, I think he said something to the effect of, Marlon, you have all it takes to do this. And at the time I was like, yeah, hey, thanks. Pop gave him a big hug. Oh my goodness. It’s made a profound difference in me. And I see that in your family. I mean, I’ve sat around your table when you guys talk about planning out the gardens and kind of assigning projects. Yeah. Well, and you’ve talked to

Josh Thomas:

The kids from the kids.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. You guys have done a masterful job.

Josh Thomas:

Well, I mean, it’s really the Lord’s blessing. And so I think just that original question, those are just a few of the things that it’s done, this life has done in raising up kits and raising up human beings into the world to go out in the world, like you said. I mean, we’ve got a generational vision that we hope family will stay close, cohesive work together. Maybe some of ’em live together, but it’s not a holding on and Hey, I want to keep you here and tie you down. No, the kids know we’re raising you up to do what God’s made you to do in the world and to go out into the world. Some of you are going to go out and you’re going to go somewhere. Some of you’re going to decide to stay here if you do, wonderful. That’s wonderful vision. But they know that they, they’re being raised up to do something in the world, productive and into God’s glory, and we’ll see what they do.

Marlin Miller:

So final question. How can we pray for you and Carolyn? How can we pray for your family?

Josh Thomas:

Oh gosh, it’s a big life. It’s a huge blessing. We want to be good stewards of what God has given us. He’s entrusted us with multiple businesses. People rely on at this point for their own provision. He’s trusted us with a good piece of ground and the opportunity to demonstrate regeneration, grace, mercy within the land. That’s the whole conversation itself. But we want to be good stewards of that. Of course, we want to be good stewards of raising the kids, the children into the world, and we want to be good stewards with our voice here in the reach that God’s given us to speak to other people. So I guess, yeah, just that God would lead us and guide us to be good stewards and to glorify him and to be open to working toward his will, where our ideas are, and all of this, the big old, crazy life he’s given us.

Marlin Miller:

It’s amazing how when you look back like we’ve been doing, and you see him steering, sometimes he smacks me over the head, you’ve probably had the same experience. But to look back over that and go, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Josh Thomas:

What’s so cool if we have a couple more minutes, it’s just even that one area. One of the big areas of my life was back in there. When I sold that house. I didn’t really talk to Carolyn about it. I mean, I think I thought I did, but I didn’t really ask her opinion. I just was like, this is what we need to do. And I did. And it’s one of those areas where I look back and I got ahead of her, but I got ahead of the Lord, particularly if I wouldn’t have been ahead of the Lord, I wouldn’t have got ahead of her. But when I look back, I could see that God had it covered and hindsight’s 2020, all that. And there’s been a few areas like that in my life, really big where I could see I was worried. I was so worried I wasn’t relying on the Lord.

But when I look back, there were just things that happened where it was like, oh, there was an avenue there. I didn’t see it. I didn’t wait. And so, yeah, he’s always there, but he covers us even in our mistakes. And it is not Dennis the menace, is it? I’m still trying to come back to this and I’m going to end up with it. I actually thought of Dennis the menace. It’s not, gosh. So anyways, he goes out, there’s this cartoon every Sunday. My grandpa always had the paper and the cartoons, and he goes out and he goes out to run an errand from mom, and he’s supposed to get from here to here, but he does this. And he comes over and he squirrels around and he gets off track. But he comes back and eventually he gets over to where he is supposed to go.

And we’ve been like that. But this is the grace of God through Jesus in that if we were perfect and God had us going, so we just go from point A to point B, but we don’t. We’re lost sheep. We go astray. But God’s always right there, and he’s so graceful. And so we get off over here and sometimes we get hard corrections, but sometimes I think he just kind of like, yeah, yeah, we loop around and come over here. And you get to be sometimes and in this analogy and you kind of go, whoa, that was a long road. I made that harder than I had to. But man, he was always right there and he had me covered even when I was going off over here. And that was an area looking back where I really see that I worried. And I can see how because of some things that were brought to me later and that showed up, he really showed me like, you were taken care of here. Had you gone this route, had you come to me first, you were taken care of. And yet, I believe he still would’ve got us to where we are now. I don’t regret that. I don’t look down on it. He was there shepherding. I went off and did a loop on my own here instead of staying a little more focused on him.

Marlin Miller:

Man, there’s so much wisdom there. Josh. Thank you. This

Josh Thomas:

Is so good. Oh, man, Marlon, I appreciate it. Let’s go. Cool off in the river this

Marlin Miller:

Afternoon. I’m all in.

Josh Thomas:

Cool. Barbecue, some pork ribs. Sounds great.

Marlin Miller:

All right,

Josh Thomas:

Thanks Josh. Yep.

Marlin Miller:

This episode is brought to you by Homestead Living Magazine. Homestead Living is a monthly print magazine that interviews all the big names in the homesteading world, and they focus and educate in a wonderful way. You can learn more and su*******@*************ng.com. So home in his book, Rembrandt is in the Wind, Russ Ramsey says that the Bible is the story of the God of the universe telling his people to care for the sojourner, the poor, the orphan, and the widow. And it’s the story of his people struggling to find the humility to carry out that holy calling guys. That is what plain values is all about. If you got anything out of this podcast, you will probably love plain values in print. You can go to plain values.com to learn more and check it out. Please like, subscribe and leave us a review. Guys, love you all. Thanks so much.