The Founding Season
January 11, 2023: a truck wreck breaks a man's back and takes his livelihood. July 5, 2023: he walks into a stone yard anyway.
All Case StudiesReverse Independence Day
On July 5, 2023 — the day he now calls his Reverse Independence Day — Kimball Roundy started shoveling sandstone for a living at Quality Building Stone in Wellington, with a broken L5 vertebra from a wreck six months earlier. Eight hours a day, scripture in his earbuds, moving roughly two tons of mountain by hand from saw table to smiting rails.
The pain was extreme. The clarity was greater. He went from being unable to lift his newborn daughter without pain to lifting 182-pound sandstone blocks off the saw — and by late 2023, he lifted his little girl and felt no pain for the first time in a year.
Look to the rock from which you were cut, to the quarry out of which you were hewn.
What Came Out of the Crucible
The identity that crystallized in that yard became a movement: “I am a Rock Smiter. I can see and hew the gift out of every stumbling block that God majestically places in my path.” The treasure was on the other side of the work he didn't choose — it always is.
The movement this season founded →