Garrett and Isabelle Heydt of Solstice Beef Company join Amy Fewell to share how their love of outdoor education, community, and real food grew into a thriving regenerative farm in Central Virginia—and why they eventually had to simplify it.
At their busiest, the Heydts were raising 3,200 broiler chickens, 50 pigs, 200 turkeys, and 40 beef cattle in a single season, all while raising young children. Then a succession of family health emergencies, backlogged orders, and one late-night breaking point forced them to ask a difficult question:
Is the farm working for our family, or are we working for the farm?
Garrett and Isabelle explain why they narrowed their operation to beef, made the painful decision to leave a multigenerational family farm, and began managing cattle across leased land. They also share how they have redefined success around faith, family culture, community, and stewardship rather than endless growth.
Isabelle opens up about her personal experience with rheumatoid arthritis, the elimination diet and lifestyle changes she credits with changing her health, and the connection she sees between healthy soil and a healthy gut. She also introduces Paced Healing and her four-module program, The Sovereign Step, which uses lessons from her Appalachian Trail thru-hike to help people approach major lifestyle changes one step at a time.
- How Garrett and Isabelle went from climbing and outdoor education to farming
- Starting a farm with broiler chickens on 12 acres
- What happened when they tried to offer every product to every customer
- The family emergency that exposed their breaking point
- Why simplifying did not mean quitting
- Leaving a multigenerational farm without abandoning their agricultural calling
- Raising cattle and regenerating soil on leased land
- The difference between a circle of influence and a circle of concern
- Redefining success for a farm family
- Isabelle’s personal rheumatoid arthritis and elimination-diet journey
- The soil-gut connection and moving away from fear-based wellness
- Why difficult choices can create the greatest opportunities
- Choosing to see God’s plan as an opportunity rather than a burden
Resources Mentioned:
Solstice Beef Company: https://solsticebeef.com/
Paced Healing:
Follow Homesteaders Of America Online:
Instagram @homesteadersofamerica Facebook / homesteadersofamerica Website https://homesteadersofamerica.com
Follow Garrett & Isabelle Online:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solsticebeefco/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/solsticebeef/
Podcast Sponsors:
Nutrimill: https://nutrimill.com/
Solstice Beef Company
Edited Podcast Transcript
Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Repeated audio, filler words, false starts, and the podcast’s formal introduction and sign-off have been removed. The speakers’ meaning and conversational tone have been preserved. Health-related comments reflect personal experiences and are not medical advice.
Speakers: Amy Fewell, Garrett Heydt, and Isabelle Heydt
Where They Are Now
Amy: For listeners who may not know you yet, give us a quick rundown of who you are and what you do now. We’ll unpack the rest as we go.
Garrett: We’re in our early thirties, and we have three children under six. We focus on community and on raising our children with a solid foundation in food and parenting. Right now, I manage a cow-calf herd and produce and market beef. Isabelle is focused on raising the children and working on a few passion projects, including sharing the story of her autoimmune disease and the role diet played in her experience.
Isabelle: You’re catching us at a special time. We feel like we’ve found our footing in our roles as husband and wife, business partners, farmers, and parents. This will be our eighth year of marriage. That may not sound like a long time to some listeners, but it feels significant to us because of all the struggles, challenges, and opportunities for growth we’ve experienced. This year, we feel like we’ve found a stride, and we’re leaning into it for now. There are always changes.
Amy: The seven-year mark in a marriage can feel like a point where you’re either going to sink or swim. It depends on how you come out on the other side, so it’s wonderful to hear that you’ve found your stride.
What does Solstice Beef Company offer now?
Garrett: About 12 months ago, we consolidated the farm to beef. We sell cow shares, make and ship beef sticks nationwide, and offer a few other beef bundles through Solstice Beef Company. We also produce live animals that we market privately to other farms.
Isabelle: I’m learning how to stack as many things as I can in a healthy, realistic way while I have three feral children underfoot. Two days a week, I teach at a local forest school, which offers 100 percent outdoor education for children.
I’m also creating resources for people who want another option for navigating autoimmunity. Our farming community has asked for that for several years because my personal health journey is a large part of why and how we farm. I’m finally in a season when I can document lessons I’ve learned over more than a decade. I want to create resources that are accessible, easy to share, and not daunting.
The Road to Farming
Amy: What were your backgrounds before farming?
Garrett: I grew up in Baltimore. I lived in the county and went to school in the city. Farming and food quality were far outside my experience. I grew up on Goldfish, Cheez-Its, and McDonald’s.
Over time, I realized there was more to the world than what I had seen. I became a climbing guide in West Virginia and began to find my own passion and direction. I was there for almost a decade. I fell in love with the local community and neighbors, many of whom I would consider homesteaders, whether or not they would use that word. For the older generation, providing their own food for the year was normal. We processed animals with our neighbors, and everyone had a garden up on the ridge.
That introduced me to a new way of life beyond Baltimore, and it eventually led me to Isabelle.
Isabelle: I grew up on a multigenerational family farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia. Farming was both a primary source of income and a way of life for multiple generations of my family.
I was homeschooled alongside my brother until sixth grade, and I found that the public school system wasn’t made for a child like me. I’ve always felt deeply connected to animals and nature. I love art and self-expression.
For a while, I did everything I thought I was supposed to do to climb the expected ladder, but I didn’t feel fulfilled. In my early twenties, I felt called to hike the Appalachian Trail. I thru-hiked from Georgia to Maine, and it broke my heart open in the best possible way.
I was searching for a love and a life committed to simplicity, nature, and teaching children how to be themselves. That brought me to West Virginia and ultimately to Garrett. Once I met him, it felt as though it had been written: I was going to meet this man, build a home, process our own animals, barter with neighbors, and have our baby at home. It was what I had been looking for my whole life.
That simple vision became the groundwork for raising our children with a strong connection to land, food, and place.
Amy: How did you make your way back to the family farm?
Garrett: When we met, I had just purchased a rough old house in West Virginia. I told myself that if I hadn’t met someone by the time I paid off that little house, I would relocate. Isabelle showed up within a few months.
Not long after that, I decided to renovate 90 percent of the house, and she chose to do it with me. Over the next two years, we got married, had our first child, and transformed the house into a comfortable home.
Around 2020, I had a severe knee injury, and we began to feel alone in West Virginia. Once the house was complete and we were ready for something new, Isabelle raised the idea of moving back to the family farm. We didn’t have a plan to start a farm business. We primarily wanted to be closer to family and have a support system.
Isabelle: We didn’t know exactly how we would start a farming business there. We only knew that my parents were willing to create space for us to put down roots.
I kept returning to one thought: We need to build community, and the rest will follow. During the pandemic, I wanted to bring people together around food and land and create space for hard conversations. I needed that as a new mother. I felt that community was the answer, and I believed we would slowly figure out the food part.
Garrett: Isabelle had taken on the house in West Virginia with me, so I was ready to take on something with her.
We knew we wanted to raise our own food. We started with broiler chickens because the initial investment was manageable and they didn’t require much land. Our first batch was 150 birds. We ate well and sold some. Because of the area we were in, it worked, so we doubled the next batch.
For several years, we raised 400 or 500 birds annually. By the end, we were raising 3,200. Our infrastructure kept growing because I never knew what scale we wanted to reach. Chickens drove our initial success. Then we introduced pigs and experimented with sheep.
It was an excellent training ground at the right scale and the right season of life. We were eating well, learning what a farm business could look like for us, and trying to create value on the family farm.
Building – and Outgrowing – a Diversified Farm
Amy: At your peak on Rucker Farm, you were raising more than 3,200 broilers, along with pigs, turkeys, and beef cattle, in a single season while raising small children. What did daily life look like, and how did you realize you had reached your limit?
Garrett: We were working toward the goal of growing into the family farm and building community in the way we had seen other farms do it. Polyface was one model we admired, and there were a few local farms that had been operating for decades that we could imagine emulating.
Slowly, we learned that our context was different. Our access to land and finances wasn’t the same, so we had to understand what we were capable of and what advantages we did have.
Once I realized I wasn’t going to build another Polyface, which was a good thing to understand, I began visiting other farms. We continued raising and selling our products, but eventually we recognized that we were trying to reach and attract every possible customer. That was gradually deteriorating our drive and passion.
What changed our course was simplifying and focusing on our actual goal. My goal had always been to graze cattle and have a positive impact on the land. I was doing that on 12 acres with several species, but I wanted to do it across hundreds or even thousands of acres. I believed cattle were the best fit for my skills.
Isabelle: My breaking point came in late fall. We had our largest batch of turkeys ready for harvest on top of a large broiler harvest, and I couldn’t help because I was in the hospital with our daughter, Sigrid, who had pneumonia. She was hospitalized for four days. Garrett could visit for only about 30 minutes in the evenings, and I was pregnant with our third child, so I spent those days in a hospital bed holding our daughter.
Less than 48 hours after we came home, our oldest son, Torrin, went over the handlebars of his bicycle. Even though he was wearing a helmet, he suffered a concussion. He forgot who he was and couldn’t see anyone in the room, so we rushed back to the emergency room. Before that week, our children had never even stepped inside a hospital. I remember praying, “God, what is going on?”
We had missed two farmers markets, which were our primary source of income, and we were about to miss another. While we were waiting to learn whether Torrin needed a CT scan, Garrett told me I needed to go home and pack orders because we were two weeks behind.
I looked at him as though he were out of his mind. My baby needed me. At the same time, he wasn’t wrong. He was also Torrin’s parent and could make sure he was okay. But I felt the enormous weight and responsibility of feeding people. Our customers had already been patient and were incredibly supportive, but they were the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. I was spread so thin.
Even that wasn’t the final breaking point. It came at 11 o’clock that night, when I couldn’t find one beef tongue at the bottom of the freezer or walk-in. I came home without packing all the orders because of that one missing item, and I was done. I couldn’t do it anymore. The farm was taking everything from me, and our third child was on the way.
Garrett: That was when I realized I needed to figure out how to manage the farm by myself, at least for a while. I maintained the operation while creating a plan to simplify and focus on work that would allow me to come home happy most days.
Over the next six or eight months, we decided to relocate to a place where we had access to more land and could scale cattle and beef in a way I could manage. It took time, but we boiled the business down. Opportunities presented themselves, and we found a path of less resistance.
We moved from asking, “How do we offer everything to every customer?” to saying, “This is what we’re going to offer. You can take it or leave it.” That has made a tremendous difference in our quality of life.
Amy: You had reached the point where you were working for the farm rather than the farm working for you. Many people begin as homesteaders and then struggle because they follow a similar path. At first, feeding your community feels amazing, but at what cost?
Unless you have the capacity to bring in more people or gain access to more land, there is a threshold in growth. We reached something similar with our raw-milk herd shares. I was pregnant with our fourth child when my husband experienced a frightening health crisis. He woke up one morning unable to talk, move, or walk. Thankfully, he recovered, but the situation brought us to our own breaking point.
With dairy cows, you can reach a place where the herd shares are bringing in some income, but to become truly sustainable, you may need to scale dramatically. That requires more land, more help, and months of investment before you see the benefit. I see people reaching that threshold and, in some cases, losing marriages or giving up everything.
You chose to pivot instead. You recognized that something was wrong, but you didn’t assume that meant you had to quit. You made a change, and it appears to be working. We don’t have to do everything or feed the whole world. We can choose what we are good at and what works for our family in the current season. That doesn’t mean the farm will never broaden again, but it means honoring the family’s capacity now.
Leaving the Family Farm
Amy: You were farming on a multigenerational property, and now you’re not. Many people dream of building a generational farm or living alongside their parents and adult children. What did that transition look like for you? What emotions and circumstances led to it?
Isabelle: It is a deeply emotional topic, but it is something we should talk about more often. There are two sides to the story, and I love my parents.
I think we can all agree that we want something better for our children than what we had for ourselves. There have been incremental improvements from one generation to the next, and we wanted to keep moving in that direction for our children. That required us to make some very hard choices, trust one another, and trust God’s plan.
I’m grateful to be on this side of it rather than where we were two years ago. That was one of the hardest chapters of my life.
Garrett: By that point, I knew with certainty that I wanted to remain in agriculture, but I wanted to do it in a way that offered a better quality of life. Isabelle wanted me to continue farming, too.
We had limited access to land. We were near Northern Virginia, where scaling often meant piecing together many 20-acre parcels and spending most of my time behind a steering wheel.
My parameters became clear: I wanted to farm, and Isabelle wanted me to farm. To do that, I needed access to more land, and the operation needed to center on ruminant animals. I didn’t want to spend my time managing employees, schedules, and complex marketing. That wasn’t suitable for my context.
I began thinking about the difference between a circle of influence and a circle of concern. You have to notice where you’re putting your energy. Our circle of influence included our passion, drive, and youth. Those were things we could work with. Our circle of concern included trying to create a situation on the family farm that was ultimately outside our control.
We had tried every approach we knew. Isabelle tried, I tried, and in some ways things went better when she tried, but it still wasn’t as successful as we needed it to be. We had to keep growing, educating ourselves, and creating life experience.
Near one of our breaking points, we began praying intensely about what to do. We drove around for a while and eventually stopped at an Outback Steakhouse simply because it was near the turnoff. We prayed, went inside, ate, and still didn’t leave with much of a plan.
Shortly afterward, a man who had operated a cattle farm for 20 or 30 years invited me to come down. I wanted to run cattle, and he needed someone who could help increase the herd. An opportunity appeared that offered much more possibility and much less burden.
Amy: Sometimes we pray without ending up with a detailed plan. We simply take the next step, say the next yes, and the path reveals itself. That is true in life, marriage, and business. It reminds us of God’s sovereignty and that, when we’re surrendered and obedient, we’re along for the ride.
What Generational Success Looks Like
Amy: Do you hope to build another generational farm?
Garrett: That’s a good question, and I don’t think we discuss it enough. My plan is to remain involved with cattle, regenerate soil, and develop rotational grazing systems at a scale where I feel I’m providing the value I was meant to provide.
When I’m working with cattle, moving them from paddock to paddock, and establishing new grazing areas, I feel that this is what I was put here to do. I have to find a way to stay involved in that work.
I want to make it appealing for our children through opportunities for self-development and financial value, but I will never expect them to join the farm. If they choose something else, that is their choice.
Our operation is currently on leased land. Eventually, we would like to purchase land when we can. For now, we’re building equity through cattle and cash flow through beef.
Isabelle: Generational succession isn’t within our circle of influence right now. We’re building what we have the ability to build and staying on a path that may make it possible one day.
For now, success looks like going to church together on Sundays because we no longer have farmers markets. It looks like Garrett having an impact on several leased properties that are many times larger than the 12 acres we had at Rucker Farm. We don’t know what the future will hold, but we like the idea of a generational farm. If it becomes possible, we’ll welcome it.
Garrett and I recently talked about what success means and when we will feel successful. I told him, “I feel like we are successful now.”
Look at what he has provided for us. I can stay home with our children. I can teach them and feed them the food I’ve always dreamed of feeding them. They are surrounded by a community that loves them and mentors who want to teach them things beyond what I can teach.
There is so much here that Garrett is cultivating and stewarding. This is success now. When I think about future success, I picture myself sitting on a blanket under a tree with all my grandchildren. That is success. Whatever happens between now and then, the goal is relationship and a sense of place.
Garrett: I feel successful because of how Isabelle sees our life. My drive and my insecurity come from the fear of whether we can sustain what we have, and that is something I still have to work through. But we are in a good place, and there is always some measure of progress.
Amy: The two of you see different sides of the same picture. Garrett thinks directly about logistics and sustainability, while Isabelle sees the beauty that is already present. Together, those perspectives create an important mirror.
More people need to ask, “What culture am I creating?” We should be concerned with whether our children know how to live, eat, act, and honor people, land, and animals.
We recently included a conversation in our magazine about the generational aspect of farming. One point came through clearly: not everyone is called to be a farmer. There are many vocations and callings. A child may be called to become a pastor, firefighter, or something else entirely. But the family culture can remain, regardless of vocation.
The Soil-Gut Connection
Amy: Let’s shift to health. For listeners who don’t understand the soil-gut connection, how would you explain it without giving a textbook answer?
Isabelle: I want to make it simple, because if it weren’t simple, I wouldn’t have done it.
Imagine going into the garden, picking up a handful of soil, and observing it: the color, the worms, the weight, and the smell. You can sense that it is alive, even before considering the microbiome and all the organisms we can’t see. A handful of soil is incredibly complex. It is God’s design and nature’s design, and I believe there is a profound connection between that living soil and the human body.
I have always been captivated by the Dust Bowl as a period of history. I also believe we’re living through a present-day loss of topsoil that people aren’t taking seriously enough. Topsoil is washing away, and degraded soils can’t retain moisture as they should.
When you look at photographs from the Dust Bowl, you see barren landscapes full of cracks and crevasses, as though the earth were desperately thirsty and breaking open. I had a moment when I thought, “The earth looks like a leaky gut.”
That led me to picture an eroded gut lining in a similar way: a protective layer that has been damaged, allowing things to pass through that normally should not. There are layers of soil and layers of the gut lining, and the analogy helped me understand my own experience.
My personal experience led me to connect autoimmunity with impaired gut health. I began thinking about the effects of antibiotics, preservatives, diets lacking real food, and food grown in nutrient-poor soil.
This has been a long personal journey, but healing the soil and supporting the gut do not have to feel impossibly complicated. I’ve also changed my view of the wellness community. Although I consider myself part of it, I think much of it operates from fear.
I want to help calm people’s nervous systems. We do not need to be afraid of everything. There are legitimate concerns about glyphosate, monocrops, and other practices, but we can make incremental lifestyle changes that slowly bring life and vitality back to our systems.
We are not broken. Our bodies are always trying to heal. But in my conversations with people experiencing chronic illness, I’ve seen that the individual eventually has to choose to participate in that process. It is a difficult choice, and taking responsibility for it can be one of the greatest struggles.
Garrett: Isabelle’s decision point was far beyond my pain threshold. I remember when the inflammation in her hands was so severe that starting the car in the morning was difficult. To me, that would make changing something feel like an obvious choice.
My own journey has been slower. I haven’t had a major illness to recover from; I’ve had milder problems such as poor sleep or digestion. My takeaway from her experience is to ask, “What does 100 percent feel like for you? What would your body feel like with full clarity? What is your potential?”
You may be able to access more of that potential by shifting habits. That is easier said than done, but it can add tremendous value over time. Whether you are dealing with chronic illness or daily discomfort, there may be opportunities to improve your quality of life.
For people who think more mechanically, I compare soil health and gut health to fueling a vehicle. Many people are careful to put the right fuel in an expensive vehicle because the wrong fuel will cause problems. You wouldn’t buy a $50,000 vehicle and fill it with old, degraded, or incorrect fuel. What are your health and body worth, and where are your values?
Isabelle’s Health Journey
Amy: What did your healing journey look like? What changes did you make, and when did you begin noticing a difference?
Isabelle: I was fortunate that my mother introduced me to the teachings of Weston A. Price when I was young. In my opinion, that represented a long-term standard of nourishment and living. Even when I couldn’t tolerate all the foods associated with that approach, I still viewed it as the goal.
I eventually had a hard realization: I needed to try a strict elimination diet. I’m careful about encouraging anyone to be as restrictive as I was. I’m not giving medical advice. I want to encourage people to explore options they feel intuitively called to consider and to look beyond managing today’s symptoms without addressing what they believe may be underlying them.
I’m not formally trained in herbalism, but as an adult I used to be quick to buy the herb, tea, or salve someone recommended online, even when the plants didn’t grow anywhere near me. Over time, I began noticing that some of the most useful plants were growing in my own yard: plantain, cleavers, chamomile, red clover, dandelion, and burdock. Many people call them weeds, but that realization changed my perspective.
The foods I felt drawn to when trying to quiet my gut were root vegetables. The sweet potato became my soul sister. I ate an extraordinary number of sweet potatoes.
I stopped worrying about calories, protein, and fiber. I thought, “I need to eat something that feels quiet.” I would eat one food and observe how my body responded. A few days later, I might add another root vegetable, such as a turnip.
The mindset wasn’t, “I can’t eat this, and I can’t eat that.” It was, “I have a good relationship with this food. In a few days, I’ll add another one.” That mental shift mattered because a restrictive diet can otherwise feel like constant fight-or-flight, as though every food is a threat.
I found my reset point and gradually built from there with root vegetables and ancestral grains. Quinoa, for example, didn’t work well for me, although many people tolerate it. I did use foods such as buckwheat, brown rice, and barley, and I learned how to soak my grains and prepare foods in ways that made them easier for me to digest.
I focused on soft, nourishing foods rather than asking a struggling digestive system to handle raw kale and carrots. Eventually, I worked my way up to bone broth. Even a simple T-bone steak would have required a lot from my system at that stage, so I progressed slowly.
If I ate leafy greens, I poached them in water to break them down. When I was ready to introduce fermented food, I didn’t begin by eating a large serving of sauerkraut. I started by drinking a little of the brine and slowly increased from there. I was trying to find my own balance.
Today, I can eat almost anything. I probably have the fewest food sensitivities of anyone in our household. I can go to Five Guys, eat the potatoes and a burger, and not be afraid that the food will hurt me. That isn’t how I want to eat all the time, but it is freeing to have a different relationship with food and confidence in how I maintain my body.
It has also been about more than food. I now live in a home and community that feel healing, and I’m more intentional about consuming media that feels healing. It has been a holistic approach, and I’m very happy with where I am.
Garrett: That journey wasn’t easy. It took roughly 18 months to two years to determine what worked for her. But living with chronic illness wasn’t easy either. We were facing around $12,000 a year in copays, and the inflammation was so severe that she couldn’t pick up our firstborn child.
Either path was hard. One involved the difficulty of experimenting and changing eating habits, which can be deeply ingrained. The other involved living with chronic illness during some of the most precious years of building our family. Both were hard, but one path offered more long-term value from my perspective. You have to choose your hard.
Amy: When you began changing your food, how soon did you notice a difference?
Isabelle: I had been in denial that I might need to remove animal proteins from my diet. Releasing that relationship became part of my growth.
During pregnancy with our first son, I was in remission, which felt miraculous. About two months postpartum, however, I experienced the worst flare-ups of my life. One night, our son was sleeping on my chest, and I physically couldn’t move him. He was crying and needed to be changed, and I thought, “It can’t be back.”
The symptoms became progressively worse. That was my rheumatoid arthritis breaking point. I felt as though I would live on air if that helped. I could imagine losing the ability to be the mother I had always dreamed of being.
I remember deciding to eat a large T-bone steak cooked in lard with salt and pepper. That was all I ate within roughly a 12-hour window. The next morning, my hands were completely fused and I couldn’t move them. I recorded the pain level, then fasted for 24 hours.
The following day, my pain had dropped to about a seven out of 10. I ate a sweet potato, and that began a new relationship with food. I could see incremental changes in my inflammation immediately.
There are important caveats. At that point, I was completely off medication, including Tylenol and ibuprofen. I had done extensive personal research because I believed something was happening in my gut. I had read that ibuprofen could damage the intestinal lining, and I didn’t want to take it. With the other variables quieted, food felt like the primary thing I was bringing into my body, and the response seemed very clear to me.
I hovered around a pain level of five for several months while experimenting. Seeing any improvement made me feel rejuvenated. I felt as though I was onto something.
Eventually, the pain continued to decrease. I might have a very good day, try a food such as avocado, and experience a flare. Instead of judging that food as good or bad, I would say, “Maybe I’m not ready yet.” I would return to the foods that had been working for another week and try the avocado again later.
That process gave me a little control, although I also think we can want too much control. Trying to control everything may create its own kind of stress and inflammation.
Garrett: The changes gave you more influence over whether you could have children and over your quality of life. You were the person who had to decide to take those steps.
Paced Healing and The Sovereign Step
Amy: Now you want to help other people through similar changes. Tell us about what you’re creating.
Isabelle: I’ve created a four-module resource through Paced Healing called The Sovereign Step. It includes videos and lessons that walk through how I navigated my diet and found relief.
I don’t think the framework applies only to people with autoimmune disease. I believe it may also be useful for people who are struggling with mental health, stress, or other forms of inflammation. If we can find our personal reset point, we may be able to develop a different relationship with food, feel less afraid, and feel less lost.
The course shares my experience of navigating all the noise and the roadmap I developed for myself. I draw from the teachings of Weston A. Price and from our experience as regenerative farmers.
I also designed the course around the way someone prepares for a thru-hike. I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2016, so this is the tenth anniversary of that journey. It was the first time I made a truly difficult choice that changed the direction of my life.
The first module is called “The Shakedown.” Before hiking thousands of miles, you empty your backpack, examine everything you’re carrying, and decide what is worth the weight. A personal shakedown is similar. You look at your news intake, social media, stress, habits, and responsibilities. How much weight are you carrying? It is difficult to focus on your gut while you’re carrying boulders on your shoulders.
This is my first course, and I’m proud of it. It came together in a beautiful flow, and I’m excited to continue developing it over the years. For now, I hope it reaches the people who need it.
I want the resource to be accessible and affordable because this kind of support wasn’t available to me 10 years ago. Technology has given us more connection, but it can still be hard to find honest personal stories that feel practical and relatable. That is what I have tried to create.
Garrett: Isabelle also makes herself available to people who work through the modules and want additional support.
Isabelle: Yes. People can schedule time with me.
Choosing Opportunity Over Burden
Amy: Before we close, what is one thing you would like to leave with the audience? It can relate to what we’ve discussed or be something entirely different.
Garrett: First, I want to thank you, Amy, for the outreach and community-building work you do. It is extremely valuable.
The idea I’ve been working through most recently is to look at circumstances through the lens of opportunity rather than burden. Another way to say it is to choose to be a volunteer in the plan God has for you rather than seeing yourself only as a victim of it.
That mindset can propel you forward in whatever journey you’re ready to take. It has been helpful to me, and it is what I would share with people who hold values similar to ours.
Isabelle: Some of the greatest rewards in our marriage and our life have come from our hardest and riskiest choices. Trust that you’re not alone and that support is available. Believe in God, believe in yourself, and remember that there are opportunities to go beyond your wildest dreams. You have to be willing to say yes.
We’re all about community and connection, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.
