Arrows and Acres

How do you spell love? Bruce Crevier says it is T-I-M-E.

Bruce and Diane Crevier have 12 children, close to 30 grandchildren, and a family ministry called Champions Forever. For about 30 years they have traveled to schools, churches, prisons and even NBA games with a show built on basketball spinning, juggling and 10-foot giraffe unicycles they build themselves. Their whole family took that show all the way to the America's Got Talent finals at Radio City Music Hall.

They are also family to us. Holly introduced their son Josiah to our daughter Makenna, the two married, and we now share two grandchildren with one on the way. We recorded this conversation in a beach rental during our April Gulf Coast Family Camp in Panama City, after the Creviers drove all the way down from South Dakota.

You will hear:

• Why quantity time matters as much as quality time, and why Bruce says "you'll get quality out of the quantity"
• How a prisoner grabbed Bruce by the arm and told him to apply to America's Got Talent, and what Bruce told his children backstage: "Every one of you deserve to be here"
• The four stages of raising a child: discipline (0 to 6), training (6 to 12), discipleship (12 to 18), and best friends from 18 on
• How eight grown sons ripped out and installed Diane's new kitchen in three days while Bruce was away
• The family Bible reading habit where every child shares a takeaway, from the youngest to the oldest
• The world record where Bruce and his son Caleb spun 60 basketballs at the same time, and the 12 stars on each ball for their 12 children
• Why they tell families to put their children in the same room
• Diane's simple homeschool approach (reading, writing, arithmetic, and teaching children to teach themselves), plus the "answers will vary" story
• The hard seasons: a daughter-in-law lost, a burst appendix, and Josiah nearly dying of spinal meningitis at one month old
• Why 10 of their 12 children live within 10 minutes of them, and why their son Isaiah says "you just made it so fun around here, none of us want to leave"

"Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward." Psalm 127:3 (NKJV)

Watch the Creviers on America's Got Talent by searching "Champions Forever AGT" on YouTube. To book them for your church, school or sports organization, visit https://championsforever.com

Better yet, come see their show for free at Gulf Coast Family Camp. Learn more at https://arrowsandacres.com

Have questions about raising a big family, homeschooling, or getting out of debt? Join The Forge, our online community and mentorship program for Christian families: https://arrowsandacres.com/the-forge

The chicken bin is crawling with maggots. The trash never made it to the curb. Mom is shouting across the house, and every child swears they never heard her.

We recorded this episode on a day that went sideways while we packed for family camp, and Daniel and Allison Hartman are honest about it: "Today has been an example of what not to do."

In this episode, Randy Schrum sits down with Daniel and Allison to talk about the one habit that keeps a large family running: the daily family meeting. They hold one every day, sometimes twice a day, and it is a different thing from family devotions. As they have said many times, clarity is kindness.

You will hear:

• What happens in a home with no family meetings: children who do not know what is expected, moms carrying the whole mental load, dads surprised by problems, chores that get forgotten, and schedules that collide
• How to run a family meeting simply ("Everyone come sit on my bed" works fine)
• The two questions their 18-year-old son Asher asks: "What are your goals today? What can I do to help?"
• Why family meetings cut down on nagging and teach responsibility
• How to give every child a voice, from the 6-year-old to the married children
• What their son-in-law Cedar said that stopped them in their tracks: "I just want to thank y'all for always asking our feedback. That's the one thing I probably appreciate the most about being in this family."
• Practical ways to start: pick a shared meal, sit everyone down, put the laundry away, and "have them look at your eyeballs"
• Why a family meeting is a huddle, not a lecture, and why discipline belongs one-on-one
• How praising a child in front of the family builds the kind of young man who cleans the fridge without being asked

If you have ever thought, "I can't make this work in my head," Allison's mom had the answer: do something, even if it's wrong. This is not rocket science. Bring in your people, sit down, and look them in the eyes.

We are not raising children. We are raising adults.

Want to build this with other families? Join The Forge, our community for Christian families building strong homes and family businesses together: https://arrowsandacres.com/the-forge

Lauren Collinsworth has seven children, is expecting her eighth, and lives on 25 acres near the Ark Encounter in Kentucky.

She is never behind on laundry.

Allison has been watching Lauren at Gulf Coast Family Camp for years. She describes her as everything she herself is not, which is exactly why she pulled out the microphone in the Airbnb and recorded this on the spot.

Lauren runs a Facebook group called Housekeeping Tips for Everyday Moms. It has 400,000 members. She has never paid to grow it. She makes no money from it. She started it because she kept showing up at other women's houses to help them get to something she calls equilibrium, and she realized she could reach more people through a group.

Equilibrium is not perfection. It is not Instagram. It is a home where the daily things are handled, where she is never nagging, never behind, and never lying awake thinking about the dishes.

She color codes every child's hangers. Her three-year-old hangs her own clothes. They do laundry every day, one load per person, about five minutes, done. All seven children are in bed by 9 PM. Every night from 9 to 11, she and her husband Timothy have the house to themselves. Every afternoon from 1:30 to 3:30, she rests.

She built this in a little double-wide trailer with almost no storage.

This episode covers color coding, morning routines, meal planning, the Skylight digital calendar, weekly routines by day, how she hosts families with no stress, why she says "your day starts the night before," and why she believes children are not a block to ministry but the whole point of it.

"Why can't we be joyful mothers who also have peace and rest? Like why not?"

Two and a half months before the wedding, the house was a frame on a trailer.

No electrical. No plumbing. No toilet. No shower.

In Part 2, Daniel and Allison finish the conversation with their oldest son, Ethan, and his bride, Savannah.

Ethan was nineteen with about $100,000 saved, a fencing business, and no debt. He could have built a $150,000 house. He chose a $30,000 tiny house instead so they could stay out of debt and have more to show for it. He had never wired a house or plumbed one. A general contractor friend, David Cross, could have done it all for him. He didn't. He told Ethan what to do first and let him do it. By the end, Ethan could go build another one.

Savannah came into the marriage with no debt and her own car. They paid for the wedding and the honeymoon in cash.

They talk about life as newlyweds on family land, with nieces and nephews knocking on the door. Savannah's goal is to be the favorite aunt, and she has the toys to prove it. They pray and read the Bible together every day, or try to. They have someone over almost every week. One night they fed eighteen people in an 8x34 tiny house. Homemade lasagna, bread, and dessert.

Savannah shares how she started baking sourdough at nineteen so she could fail at it before she had children, and how that turned into a monthly snail mail with recipes, photos, stickers, and homestead updates.

Ethan shares how he runs his fencing business: honest work, worship music only on the job site, four employees, and a goal to leave every property better than he found it. When he wanted to get better, he asked other fence contractors what they would do. Their answer: do good work.

Then Allison asks the hard question. Did we go too hard on you?

"Honestly no. I felt bad for all the people who had their moms doing the laundry for them."

They close with what they would do the same with their own children, why Savannah says the Hartmans work hard and play hard, and why Ethan believes you judge a tree by its fruit.

Missed Part 1? Start with EP 28.

Ethan grew up with three older sisters. Four moms, really. They told him what to wear, how to do his hair, which bedding he was allowed to use. They dressed him up. They painted his fingernails.

He did not roll over and take it.

In Part 1, Daniel and Allison sit down with their oldest son, Ethan, and his new bride, Savannah.

First, the business. Ethan started selling moringa trees at twelve, with pots he asked people for and soil he mixed from Daniel's recipe. He sold $800 worth of trees on his first market day. He had been saving since he was eight, not for a car, but to build a house. At seventeen he worked one fence job with his brother-in-law Cedar in 110 degree July heat and loved it. His first fence on his own took about fifty hours. He can build that same fence today in five and a half. Around 200 fences later, he sometimes has enough work to run two crews, and when work is slow he knocks doors. Sometimes seventy doors for three jobs.

No school taught him fencing. No school taught him business.

Then, Savannah. They first crossed paths at a volleyball event in Tennessee, but only in passing. Then she came to family camp as a single with another family, and the Hartmans loved her right away. Ethan did not. She tattled on him to his mom and sisters. He called her arrogant. "No love, just hate."

Until the April retreat.

Ethan had never dated anyone before her. He wrote his own relationship guidelines, called a few people for advice, and shared them with Savannah as soon as he could so they could hold each other accountable. They saved their first kiss for the wedding. They almost never drove anywhere alone.

And Savannah explains why the sibling in the back seat was never just a chaperone to her.

"Now I have ten siblings who actually enjoy me and have been around me and know who I am because we were intentional about having them, rather than it just being the third person in the back row to make sure we don't hold hands."

Part 2 is coming next week.

Josiah lived in a camper in their backyard.

He was also their employee. And their tenant. And the young man trying to marry their oldest daughter. Every other day Daniel and I changed our minds about what the rules were. You can't go into that room. Wait, no. You can go in that room, but not that one.

It was our first time walking a child through courtship. We did not have it figured out.

In Part 2, MaKenna and Josiah finish the story. The setup that brought Josiah from the bus to the backyard. Why Daniel liked him from day one, even when I didn't understand it. The five dates they had alone in a year and a half of courtship. The friend who sat MaKenna down and told her what she was about to settle for. The first kiss they saved for the wedding.

Then what they built. An Airstream on family land, bought with swim money. A pole barn that was their wedding venue and then their first home. A house going up debt-free, now worth around $600,000, with about $300,000 into it. Josiah doing most of the work himself, trading cabinet-building skills for crane time, calling in the family for the days the load was too heavy.

And what MaKenna says now about the childhood people told her she was robbed of.

"I'm going to do the same thing with my children. So I don't think my childhood was robbed in any way. That was the number one thing people told me. And it was a lie I believed for a long time."

Meet our oldest daughter.

MaKenna was four or five when she ran a gumball machine at the studio. She was sixteen when she drove herself to the largest farmers market in Pensacola with healthy chocolate she had stayed up until 3 in the morning making. She was eighteen when she talked her way into ISR infant swim instructor training, a program that didn't take anyone under twenty-one, and paid the eight to ten thousand dollars herself. It wasn't even half of what she had saved from chocolate and flipping furniture.

She never worked a normal job.

She was also our test pilot. Everything we figured out as parents, we figured out on her first.

In Part 1, MaKenna and her husband Josiah sit down with us and tell the truth about what that was like. Being the oldest of eleven and being called "the second mom." The teen years when she didn't want all these siblings. Why family camp turned it around for her. Walking away from college. The swim business she built instead.

Then Josiah's side. He grew up fifth of twelve in the Crevier family, whose ministry, Champions Forever, juggles, unicycles, and spins basketballs to share the gospel everywhere from prisons to NBA Finals halftime shows. We met his family at a national volleyball tournament in Dayton, Tennessee. His father looked at Allison and said, "I have a son you need to meet."

That son was in South Korea at the time.

Married almost six years, expecting their third baby, living on our family land, and building their home without a loan.

We made all our mistakes on her. She still turned out amazing.

She had eleven children. Two of her oldest had already walked away from everything she raised them for. And she was calling because she could see her third headed the same direction.

When I told her what I was observing, she finally broke down and said it:

"I am a mother of fear."

Fear in motherhood does not always look like panic. It looks like controlling everything your child touches. Rescuing them before the consequence has time to land. Parenting so the moms at co-op think you have it together. Making every decision around "what if I lose them?" instead of "what has God asked of me today?"

In this episode, Allison walks through the contrasts between the fearful woman and the courageous woman — pulling from her own confessions (yes, the matching monogrammed outfits were her), real stories from the farmers market, and how God answered every single fear she had about her daughters.

The fearful mom tries to keep the arrow. The courageous mom prepares it to fly.

Psalm 127 says children are arrows in the hands of a warrior. You do not spend years shaping an arrow because you plan to hold onto it forever.

"God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." — 2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV

Come build with us. 🌿🏹

In Part 1, we told you the truth about how we started homeschooling, and how much we got wrong before we got it right. In Part 2, Daniel and I sit down to answer the questions we hear most, the ones that keep good parents up at night.

What about college? What about socialization? What if my child falls behind? What if my spouse isn't on board? We take them one at a time, honestly, from inside a home that has raised children from a six-year-old all the way up to married adults running their own businesses.

Here is the heart of it: you cannot mess this up. Spending your days with your children is never wasted time. Education is your God-given responsibility, and no one is more qualified to steward your child's heart than you.

In this episode:

• Why "you can't homeschool badly" is closer to the truth than you think
• The friend who taught six children for a year with nothing but paper, pens, and a Bible, and off-the-charts test scores
• What our school day actually looks like (most bookwork is done by 10 a.m.)
• The curriculum and audiobooks our children love, from Masterbooks to Chuck Black's Kingdom series
• How making dinner, running a market booth, and digging a pond all count as school
• What to do when your husband or wife is not convinced yet
• The real goal: raising adults who can hear God's voice, not building a transcript
  

"I don't care if they know Latin. I care that they can hear God's voice."

That is the goal. Faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).

If this encourages you, share it with a friend who needs permission to begin.

Want to go deeper with us? Come learn about The Forge, our community for families building something that lasts. Visit arrowsandacres.com and click on The Forge.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode. 🌿🏹

I didn't think I could do it. I had a college degree and still thought a classroom would do it better.

Daniel knew from the time he was sixteen that our children would be homeschooled. He wasn't arrogant about it. He was just clear. The worldview being taught in a classroom, that evolution is fact and God is theory, was enough for him to decide. That was enough for me too, eventually.

But even knowing the why, I put McKenna in a classical Christian private school for K4. Because I was certain they could do it better than I could.

That's where this episode starts.

Part 1 of our homeschooling series covers the whole story. Our conviction and how we landed there. McKenna's journey, the dyslexia, the college years we nearly committed to, and the pivot that changed everything. The benefits that matter most, and they are not the ones most families talk about. And three of the biggest objections Daniel and I hear constantly at every conference and in every conversation:

"My children won't be socialized." We tell you exactly why that argument doesn't hold.

"I'm not qualified." You know your child. No one in any classroom does.

"We can't afford it." Daniel's answer is honest. It may not be comfortable.

But it is true.

This is the episode for the mom who has been turning this over in her mind for months and just needs someone to tell her she can do it.

She can. 🌿🏹