Before the painful events, upcoming wrecks, before Ohio, before West Virginia, there was a kid who spent a lot of time alone.
I climbed trees. I loved video games. I was always drawn toward artwork, drawing, creating things, mixing cosmetics in the bath like my own potion store, story telling, reading and getting lost in whatever caught my imagination. I loved the water, and I had a heart for animals from an early age, because humans caused hurt.
There were good parts of childhood. There were painful ones too.
I knew what abandonment felt like. I knew what it was like to be bullied, to feel different, and to spend a lot of time inside my own head.
And somewhere through all of it, I started asking bigger questions.
I was born and raised in Illinois. In 2010, I ran off to Marietta, Ohio, and the years that followed carried me through places and circumstances I never could have planned.
But the wreckage started before that.
I was riding as a passenger with no seatbelt when we hit another vehicle head-on at highway speed.
My eyes were open.
I remember the split second of knowing we were about to hit. Then there was blinding light everywhere. Glass flying. Crushing pressure. Deafening mechanical noise. I remember being violently thrown around as the Jeep flipped through the air, went over a guardrail and rolled through an actual cornfield.
It came to rest crushed onto the passenger side. My side.
I was trapped inside.
The driver left me there.
My stepdad was chief of the Toulon Fire Department, and people I knew from high school were among those working to get me out. In the ambulance, an EMT held my hand, cried and prayed over me on the way to the hospital.
She turned out to be my next-door neighbor.
My ankle and foot took the worst of the injury. Nothing was broken, but I spent at least six months on crutches and in an air cast, with months of physical therapy before I could walk normally again.
Another highway wreck. Another time as the helpless passenger. This time in a rainstorm. One vehicle hit my side while another impact came from my mom's side.
Life took another strange turn that temporarily put me in Attica, Indiana.
Earlier that day, crows had gathered all around the building where I worked as a waitress — on the roof, outside, directly in front of me. There were enough of them that I noticed. Something about it gave me a strange feeling I never forgot.
Here's a picture of around wreck time.
Around midnight, I realized I had accidentally taken the restaurant keys home with me, so I went back out to return them.
An opossum. A STINKING POSSUM. Was just sitting in the road, staring into my soul, I tell everyone it wasn’t normal, something felt very odd and incredibly eerie that night, especially that possum, and everyone around the area knew that road was strange. I swerved. Just barely though.
Around 60-70mph.
Something in the suspension failed. I had lost full control. Once again, no seatbelt.
The car shot off sharply on the right side of a what seemed like cursed country highway, hit the ditch, struck a tree stump and rolled through a field.
When I opened my eyes, I was inside my car in the middle of the field, covered in blood — but alive.
I eventually stumbled back toward the country road until I could flag someone down.
Cuts. Pain. A shoulder injury.
Still, nothing broken.
After surviving things that could have ended very differently, I couldn't stop asking why.
Why was I still here?
But the questions had started long before the wrecks. I had spent much of my life questioning what I was told, searching for what was actually true, and wondering whether God was really there at all.
I didn't want to believe simply because somebody told me to. I didn't want fear to be the reason I believed either.
I wanted something real. Something I personally couldn't explain away.
Not something I could explain away.
Not coincidence because I wanted it to be true.
Not somebody simply telling me what I should believe.
I wanted an answer I couldn't deny.
My mom was visiting West Virginia for the first time, and we needed something interesting to do together.
A friend mentioned there was an event that night at a church in Parkersburg involving the world's largest drum set being filmed on a Shipping Wars episode.
I didn't know who the heck Mark Temperato was. I didn't even know he was a guest pastor yet, I wouldn't have cared regardless, I just wanted to see something cool. Man, did God ever set me up!
I just knew the world's largest drum set sounded interesting enough to go see.
We went.
I remember my friend pointing him out and saying, "That's him. That's the pastor with the drumset."
Then Mark played.
The drum set was enormous. Hundreds of pieces surrounded him in every direction. It was unlike anything I had ever seen.
But the drum set wasn't the point.
Neither was Mark.
He was simply one link in a chain of circumstances that had somehow brought me into that room that night.
And before the night was over, everything would become intensely personal.
He kept saying there was someone who needed to come up there.
That person knew who they were. They could feel it wrenching in their gut.
He said he would wait — that he would not leave or resume until that person came forward.
I didn't know why I needed to go.
I only knew that I did.
The feeling in my stomach became so overwhelming that I felt like I was going to explode if I stayed where I was.
So I walked straight toward the middle.
Mark didn't know me. He was visiting all the way from New York. I didn't know anyone in this place either.
He couldn't have known what I had survived, the questions I had spent years asking, or the proof I had been demanding from God. God knew, this is exactly what it would take. A room full of strangers, and a stranger who would jumpstart my heart from the grave.
He was simply the person God used that night.
And then he began speaking directly into things a stranger should not have known.
He took my hand.
And then this stranger began speaking and singing over my life.
He did not know my history. He did not know what had happened in those cars. He did not know the questions I had been asking God.
“Could've died in that car that night, but My hand was there and it was right. By My Spirit, I was with you.”
Mark didn't save me.
He was the messenger.
For me, the answer was that God had reached directly into the questions I had been asking — through a stranger who could not have known the story behind them.
I had asked for something real enough that I couldn't deny it.
That night, I believed I had received my answer.
I had spent years asking whether God was real.
That night, for me, that question was answered.
I gave my life to Jesus.
I DIDN’T RECITE A SPECIAL PRAYER, I DIDN’T GO TO AN ALTAR CALL.
IN THAT INSTANT, MY HEART WAS TRULY CONVINCED THAT HE HELD MY LIFE.
I WENT HOME, AND ENDED UP HAVING A FULL BLOWN PANIC ATTACK IN MY BEDROOM.
FROM THAT MOMENT, GOD LED ME TO DESTROY MANY OF MY DARK COLLECTIONS, AND THE CURRENT COURSE OF MY LIFE FULLY CHANGED OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS.
I WAS SHAKEN.
I HAD TRUTH.
I HAD PURPOSE.
AND THEN I BEGAN TO HAVE A CHURCH AND CHURCH FAMILY WHERE THAT ALL HAPPENED, WHERE I WAS DIRECTED AND TAUGHT IN THE WORD AND DELIVERANCE MINISTRY.
I STARTED TO UNDERSTAND "WHY".
MOST OF MY QUESTIONS WERE ANSWERED, AND I BEGAN TO LEARN TO ACTUALLY CONVERSE AND HAVE A REAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE KING OF KINGS THAT SAVED MY LIFE OVER, AND OVER, AND OVER AGAIN.
HE HOLDS MY HEART.
Life did not suddenly become perfect. The wreckage did not disappear. I still had things to heal from, things to learn, mistakes to make, and years of life ahead of me.
Following Jesus did not mean every hard thing stopped happening.
But one question was no longer unanswered.
I knew Who I belonged to.
I spent years in West Virginia. Along the way, I met the man who would become my husband in Mason, West Virginia.
Life grew into marriage, family, motherhood, and a future that looked very different from the one I once imagined.
In 2021, that road eventually brought us back into Ohio.
The kid who loved artwork, music, creating, animals, learning, and asking questions was still there.
Those pieces eventually began finding their way into the life we were building — family, homesteading, making things by hand, learning how and why things work, and trying to live with intention.
Eventually, creating stopped being just something I loved doing.
It became part of what we were building together.
A remnant is what remains after everything else has been stripped away.
For me, the name carries the story of surviving things that could have ended very differently — and of believing that survival itself is not the finish line.
What remains can still be rebuilt.
What remains can still create.
What remains can still serve.
What remains can still have purpose.
That is the heart behind The Remnant Homestead.
The Remnant Homestead did not begin with polished labels, a catalog of products, or some perfect business plan.
It began over a decade ago, by making things. Learning. Questioning all ingredients. Trying something, changing it, and trying again.
Some of the earliest things I made looked nothing like what we make today.
It went kind of wrong, cooked too fast, lava burst, but I gave a lot of them away and ended up gaining forever customers even just with this one messed up bar.
The first logo I ever created, I was proud, it meant a lot to me, and I'll never forget it.
Many evolutions of labels and logos, many trials and errors, but I already had a pretty solid foundation for product making from the start anyways. Some things just take time and practice.
The products changed. The formulas changed. The labels definitely changed.
But the reason behind it kept getting clearer: make things intentionally, keep learning, and build something that could actually mean something to the people who found it.
The Remnant Homestead is where a lot of different pieces of our life finally began meeting in one place.
Products are part of it. But so are family, learning, creating, homesteading, questioning what has become normal, helping people, and trying to build something with intention.
This was never supposed to be only about selling things.
Make things because there is a reason for them to exist — not simply because they can be sold.
Ask why an ingredient is used. Ask whether there is another way. Ask what actually works instead of accepting something simply because it has always been done that way.
Knowing how to make something matters. Understanding why it works, where it came from, and how to improve it matters too.
Botanicals, clays, oils, tallow, waxes, herbs, and the materials around us all have something to teach us. Natural doesn't automatically mean perfect — but it is worth understanding.
Products get used up. What people learn, remember, share, create, and pass on can last much longer.
There are products here, but there is also a family behind them. A home. Questions. Experiments. Failures. Faith. Learning. People we care about. Things we're still figuring out.
The goal isn't to pretend we have everything perfected.
The goal is to keep building something useful, meaningful, honest, and worth passing on.
If you made it this far, thank you for hearing the story behind the name.
The Remnant Homestead is still growing, still learning, and still becoming what it is meant to be.
You're welcome to keep exploring.
