My Final Good-Bye (mentor)

Shabbat shalom! It's Saturday. I don't normally vlog on Saturday, but we've got Mr. Meeks, my spiritual daddy, my mentor's celebration of life today. So we have a 2.5-hour drive to Tennessee, there and back, plus the celebration. I can tell you this, it will be a blessing. And I wouldn't miss this for the world. It's not exactly restful, and I feel like it's going to be so special I want to document it. So I'm taking y'all along. In honor of the Sabbath, I'm going to do two things despite this vlogging. One, I'm not going to monetize this. Enjoy this ad-free Shabbat Shalom gift to you. Two, I'm going to keep this editing really simple. No music, no No special video drops, nothing. Keep my costs minimal in the editing. Slept in a little this morning. Just woke up naturally. We stayed up later last night watching a movie. That's our Friday night tradition. Oh look, I asked the boys if they wanted to help me. I didn't even think they heard me. I was gonna sneak and do their chores for them. You coming with me? Yeah. I didn't think you heard me. I did. All right, let's do it. I'm gonna go around that way to the kitchen and get all the stuff. We got some warm feed for these chickens. They didn't even budge. Josiah and I'll knock it out together. Somehow chores still feel somewhat restful on the Sabbath. We just do chores, no projects. Most the time lately we have Austin, he takes Sunday, so— and we take Saturday, so it works out nicely. He can give us a day off. Been letting this water warm up. Josiah and I'll get a special time together. You know you hurt me, bud. I'll make you a bulletproof coffee after this. How about that? He's like, is that too exciting about that? No? Let's try this, uh, room temp chicken feed for chickens. I'm gonna spoil them. No cart on the Sabbath. I'm gonna use Sally. I'm gonna ride right up to everything. And Sabbath chores are always kind of fun because me and usually somebody else tries to sneak and do them. We'll tell Jonah we saved everything for him. Well, maybe Jonah could do the nest. You get their water, make sure their nest box cleaned out, and I'll do this. I'm excited for these chickens getting room temp water or feed on these cold mornings. Spoiled birds, but they spoil me. Probably the world's second greatest food behind limp beef liver. You guys tired this morning? Come on, you tired this morning? Notice that Josiah and I, my kids and I, can have quality time doing work. You don't have to go off to Funland and do go-karts. You can be on the farm too. Quality time happens organically in quantity time. Quantity time is important. Te gusta? Te gusta that warm feed? Good. I think I've noticed about this— this smells sweeter, smells more fermented, probably because it was sitting in water at room temp last night and not at high 30s, low 40s. Did you get that nest box cleaned out? All right, if I see anything needs to be done, just take a mental note. Write it down. If it can wait, it waits till Sunday. Knocking out 4 birds with 1 stone right now. Light in our eyes, sunlight, getting with the circadian rhythm, bonding with my son. Of course we're getting the chores done, we're getting the milk, and we're getting some movement. That would be horrible. Actually, we're getting a little bit of a cold exposure. It's a little chilly. Those calves are pressing the edge of the fence. That's why I like to get up here right at first light. I hope you guys fed them some hay. There's no grass in there. Did y'all feed them some hay? Yeah, there's one out. Let's mark that one and kill him on Sunday. Non-milkers, they ate that paddock down. I have to get them a hay bale. Oh my God, he makes me hungry. Oh, that's where it's at. We're letting them go up to 30 months instead of 18. Killing him in May, just like that fat old lady hens. He's gonna have such a better meat constitution, so much fattier. Taking a picture of that one because she needs to be killed Sunday. You're gonna get killed in about a month-ish anyway. I mean, maybe we'll just kill them. Maybe we'll just kill them all. It's not like they're gonna grow that much bigger. And with this, you know what, we need to kill them because with this, uh, well shoot, we can't kill them on Sunday. We're having the families with teens meeting. We're gonna have our individual private family, just me and the boys, Mighty Man Camp. You got everything Ready? Cloth in the water, ready to go. This will never hold in sheep. Whoa, is she okay? That sealed up. Look in their lips. Here would be to get home before Henry wakes up, therefore mom wakes up, so she has a peaceful morning. Maybe if we can keep this one separate till Sunday, we'll know who it is. We can kill one on Sunday. We're really basically just gonna get the legs off of them and then just cut up the bones, and I'm gonna roast those and have— then make broth and make lamb bit. I'll have lamb bits. Here you go. See very little of this weed. When we were on the mountain yesterday, there was a ton of it from rotating, just continual rotation grazing. I'm just gonna mow it down and kill the seeds right there. What's the news? Nothing. Mom kick you out? I just came out. Everybody asleep? Yeah. Okay, hopefully he's not bothering Mom. No. Okay, let's go make her breakfast. Hopefully Henry's not waking her up. You'll do this, filter the milk, I'll make breakfast. Well, I guess you're not. I'll make Mom breakfast. You can eat whatever you want. Get you by. Excited. I'm gonna make Mom some of that, uh, chicken sausage. Fat old lady hen sausage. I'm gonna make Mom a nice breakfast. While we're at it, why don't we make her some pico de gallo to go on the eggs? You simply cannot buy this. This is why we're growing our food, y'all, because this— the health superiority of it. This chicken fat, I don't even know if we'll need to oil this pan. This is from old lady hens, so they would have been 2 and a half years old. They— egg production would have dropped in half. In case there's not enough oil in this, I'm gonna use schmaltz made from them. Schmaltz is rendered chicken fat. Just a little bit in case we don't need it. I'm just looking for an excuse to use this schmaltz. Well, fun's over. Burn It Up Cooking Show. Wouldn't be Burn It Up Cooking Show without the fire alarms going off. Forgot to turn the vent on. Rookie mistake. She's gonna really like this. When the wife is winning, you're winning. Rebecca here, incoming, okay? Incoming. No, no, incoming. You stay right there. I want you to taste that chicken sausage first. Oh wow, looks amazing. Makes it a little easier to get it down, doesn't it? I don't want to burn my tongue. I burned it last night on the pizza. And this is plain fat old lady hen sausage. Yeah, good. Maybe there's one more salt. That's all right. Oh my gosh, it's really gonna be the Burn It Up cooking show here in a minute. Okay, that chicken sausage is very fulfilling, very nutrient-dense. We only needed one apiece. It's a win. Much better than chick— fat-related chicken pizza crust. Really? It was not good. Let's try the cheese crust next. It looks good. Probably trick all the kids. Making the boys some hot chocolate. Jonah's gonna go out to kind of finish up the chores we started. Move the net, set up the water, get them hay. This is a moment. This has been almost 2 months. Bulletproof coffee. It's time to intro it. First time drinking coffee in too much. I tried to half the sweetener and I did, and I did honey instead. I need a little bit more, but there's so much goodness in this. Raw egg, butter, coconut oil, a little bit of chocolate, chocolate milk for the boys. Anybody want to go to the fire with me? Look who joined me! Thanks for joining me. Okay, getting ready. We just got here. That's an A-Team van. Everybody looks So sharp. Playing this wrong. Classic Justin Rhodes special. No margin. We get here at 5 till it starts. Just got the kids a special treat. All right, everybody did so well. And I guess Henry did as well as he could. I had to leave about a little halfway into it. I had to go outside with Henry. He's not trained to sit still. He's feral. We dress up so little. Jonah has outgrown his dress-up. Josiah got the last of his driving ed— driver's ed. Nighttime hours. I'll say something about Mr. Meeks here, just raw, uncut, unedited, real time, real talk. First of all, this death hits differently. My dad was supposed to die. I mean, he's 86 years old. Rebecca's mom, supposed to die. She's older. I mean, not really. I mean, she wasn't supposed to, you know what I mean? But these are people close to us, but it was a natural order. They were old enough. Mr. Meeks was not old enough and was in good health, and this was suddenly— he wasn't supposed to die. And there are people in my life who weren't supposed to die. I've had people I've went to school with who have been murdered, or believe it or not, or another guy dropped out. What's that one where the athletic person can just— their heart quits or something? I've had a friend that did that. He was in physical therapy. But I wasn't any longer— I wasn't close to them anymore. And I'm looking back, realizing I go back almost 20 years with Mr. Meeks. Y'all wouldn't know me if it weren't for him. He turned me on to Joel Salatin. He turned me on to my first steers, told me how to do that, gave me the book 4-Hour Workweek, which helped me launch this business. He cheered for us all along. So there's a lot of just death awareness with this one. I think I'm more anxious and think I'm more irritable, which is quite the opposite of what he was. I don't know about the anxious one. I just learned that he was pretty anxious. I'd have to talk to his kids if he was irritable. I never saw it too much. Um, certainly never saw him raise his voice, but I wasn't around him all the time like his kids. I wrote down some things because when somebody dies, it's time to reflect and think, what did we learn? How can we be better? How can we be changed from this person's life? What did we learn from him? First of all, I learned how to raise a steer for profit. I could profit $1,000 a head on a steer thanks to Steve and his model. Second thing is Steve would always recruit others, not necessarily just younger people, disciple-type people, but anybody. He would have a vision and an idea, and he knew he couldn't or didn't want to do it alone, and he would recruit others. And they would be quite the somewhat eclectic group too. He took, it took all kinds and he accepted anyone. And at this funeral tonight, we had a wide range of kind of people. And I might even think, everybody's so different, I'm so different, what did he even see in me? The third thing would be that he took others in and discipled them. Them, really put into them, not just walk you through some book program, but took you along in what he was doing, but also met you where you were at. He made the time. There were countless phone calls to him for counsel. There were countless texts and even meetings. He's 3 hours away. I remember early on in raising children, I would drive an hour and a half, we'd eat meat at the Bass Pro Shop. Never charged me for this. He just, he took time for people. He was very relational. I'm very task, get things done, and he's very visual and relational. There were a number of people there who felt like he was another father for them. I'm not alone in that. And that takes relation. It wasn't long before he died. I don't know if it was the day before, but on his way home from a trip, he felt led to call every single one of his children. He's got 5. Wasn't listening to an audiobook or podcast, anything like that. He called his children. The 5th thing is a man A man gives and a boy takes. A man can have moments of boyhoodness. He's not perfect. And a boy, even Henry, can have moments of manhood. Henry can have moments of servanthood. That's what differentiates us. That's what being a real man is. If you want to be a man and do the right thing, then serve. I wrote this one down at the funeral. I'm learning this at the funeral. He always delighted in others. I need to delight in my children, in my wife. Not just compliment them or thank them, but for them to know that I enjoy them, that they feel my smile. That they see my smile, that I express to them, not that just I'm proud of them, but that I enjoy you. His son Caleb told me tonight, "Dad loved you," is what he said, "but he also liked you." And there is a difference. There's something very special about being liked and enjoyed. And perhaps one of the most important things, 7, you guys hear me talk about it especially lately more, The Garden of Peace. He gave me the book, The Garden of Peace, where essentially a couple of things, you understand your wife as a mirror. The things that may bother you about her are just God's way of trying to communicate with you something. God uses our wives to speak with us and improve, to speak to us and improve us and hone us and make us better. We are to treat our wife as the number one queen that she is, right? And tend that garden of peace, and that's the highest It's one thing to give somebody a book, but it's another to know and see someone live it out. And even admit to their shortcomings, but to know it's possible. I think there's one more thing. I must have skipped something because here's another one. Mr. Meeks and Donna were— Donna and Steve Meeks. We're our children's godparents. Forgot to find some other ones. But because their children are grown and have turned out well, they're around, none of them rebelled, they get along with each other, like each other, they like their parents and be around the parents, that's success. And they weren't quite old enough, they weren't too old to not be able to take our kids if it came to that. But they were old enough to see that the fruit of their labor. Rebecca and I always wanted to be in the, in the Christmas card with them, so to speak. We wanted to be at the Thanksgiving dinner. We wanted to get that far. And some of that was joking and just whatnot, but others wasn't. We wanted to be adopted in, and I believe they adopted it in as well as anybody could, better than anybody could. And here's the thing I learned tonight, that he couldn't quite possibly take in all those people, all the extended family, okay? But what they did give is something even bigger and more— has even more potential. You see a family like that where there's peace, security, encouragement, safety, things like that, and you want it. You want to be a part of that. But it can't quite physically possibly happen, then you know what that means? Then you be inspired by it and create it for yourself. I'll need to create that for myself and this family, and then it's this huge network effect. Because if I were gonna be absorbed and adopted into them, that'd be the end of it. But it multiplies when I'm inspired by that and then do it in my own family. And I know it's possible because I've seen Steve and Donna do it. So I'll be encouraged at least for a number of days ahead to breathe deep, be kind to the children, coast through frustration, try to see the bigger picture, calm down, enjoy others, let them see my joy in them, and be a man and do the right thing. If you're still here, my God, I love you. And I'm taking joy in you right now. Thank you for watching these. Thank you. Thank you for hearing me out. I take great joy in you. Because I lost the— we lost the faux fans. How many minutes am I in this? Wow, it's been 6 minutes, but it feels like it's been 25. We lost the phone 6 and a half minutes ago. It's almost been 7 minutes. See, so see my joy in you right now. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you and I like you. Happy day.