Settling In...

After a week on the road for our missions' staff retreat in beautiful Pennsylvania, we are HOME and settling back into our pace of life as we know it here. Two times a year the East coast staff with U.S. Center for World Mission gets together to reconnect, encourage, cast vision, and just be together for a few days. It's a really nice time of refreshment, mutual encouragement, and a really fabulous balance of both work and play! We were the only family there with young children, so we would go to some of the meetings - fully decked out with school, books, legos, trucks, and crayons; and then, when the natives got a little restless, the littles and I went back to our room and played, or just explored the retreat center until everyone broke for lunch or supper. It was a pretty sweet deal.

There are SO many things that we love about Pennsylvania. This was our home away from home for three years, after all; and Jesse is our little PA souvinir that we brought back home with us! We were able to see a couple of friends from Philadelphia Biblical University, we explored some of our old haunts, and we spent the week-end with our church family where Kev led worship for three years. I tell you what - that just put the wind back into our sails and totally encouraged us in SO many ways. That chapter of our lives has God's grace written all over it. Not that every chapter doesn't have His grace woven in and throughout...but that three year season in Philly - (after my initial grieving of the total uproot and major move away from home, family, friends and life as I knew it, along with being a brand new Mama was dealt with) - just totally and completely turned out to be an awesome chapter of rest and growth. And it was a time for me where God truly proved Himself faithful on so many levels.

We were brand new parents, and we had just moved away from both sets of family, from awesome friends, from a totally supportive and loving home church, from my very first HoMe, and from the country --- to the city where I knew no-one, to a brand new church that was a totally different culture for me, and to a University where we were the only ones pushing a stroller during Freshman orientation. I was a fish out of water, and the entire packing time up to the move, I was stressed, sad, and worried. My parents built their first home, had all their babies there, and fully intend to grow old and die in that home...and I guess I had always assumed that I would do the same. In my book, we had the perfect life. Sweet little house in the country, sweet little baby, we were close to both sets of parents, and we had sweet jobs - Kev as Youth pastor and me as a part-time teacher at a local Christian school. As far as I was concerned, my future was mapped out.

So this move - this true leaving and cleaving and following my husband and the Lord was a total and complete testing of my faith, and really - for the first time in my life it was a time when I saw the Lord provide for me and prove Himself faithful exceedingly and abundantly above and beyond all I could have ever asked for or imagined. Some dear friends made a weekend roadtrip with us before the actual move for a complete apartment overhaul. We ripped up old carpets, sanded and urethaned wooden floors, painted every wall, and totally set everything up, so that we when walked through the doors the first night of our move, I was honestly happy and it already felt like home because of the work that had already been done previous. Our first year there, several young couples moved into the complex and for our entire time as students we lived glorified dorm life - married style - where we all had babies together, grilled in our backyard, and went on week-end adventures all over the place together. Our new church welcomed us with open arms and showed us unconditional love and support. They threw me a ginormous baby shower for Jesse, and they surrounded us with love and support when he burnt his hands and had to have skin graft surgery. And we made some of the best friends of our lives -many with whom we still stay in contact.

Over and over, time and again - God filled in the gaps for me. He proved Himself faithful, and those three years have changed me. I love my home and my life here. I am perfectly content with my little world, my job, my neighbors, my friends, my ministry, my chickens, and my garden. But I have the heart of a nomad now. If God asked me to, I could give this up - because friends and family are forever, anyway - and everything else is just details. So because of these lessons learned in my life, and because of that season of grace and growth, Pennsylvania will be forever dear to my heart, and it will always be a home away from home for our little family.