Home

I remember in college feeling like a nomad, very roughly like a nomad. It didn't quite feel like Concord, North Carolina was my home anymore (that was sooo high school), Harding was like my home except I was switching dorm rooms and sometimes roommates every year or so. During the summers I took community college classes, I interned in Atlanta with a church, and I was in Africa on a missions internship. One spring I spent abroad in Italy, and basically lived out of a suitcase for a semester. I had a fantastic experience with all of it. But I grew tired of feeling so transient. I was ready to feel more settled, to find a sense of home again. That didn't exactly happen until late 2006 when Nathan and I married. After Harding, I was in two different homes during grad school and then spent time in two homes in Muskogee before getting married. I have lived in this home in Muskogee the longest of anywhere I have lived. Eight and a half years.
In this home I spent the better part of my 20's, became a wife, became a mother. We've hosted parties, dinners, cook-outs, game-nights, movie-nights, sleep overs. My kids have had birthday parties, scraped knees, and sweet dreams here. Nathan and I have prayed and cried and laughed so hard through the years under this roof. Each of our three babies have had the same crib, in the same room. The baby room was first painted "Graham Cracker" for Isaac, then "Lavender Fog" for Aniyah, and currently it is a very calming, perfectly sweet baby blue for Ezra.
I've been trying to slowly sort and clear out and sell things in preparation for putting our house on the market. They say spring is the best time. I've just kept busy. I haven't had too much trouble parting with our stuff, though being a pack-rat comes rather easily for me I confess. Over the years, and through the moves, I just got sick of packing it all from place to place. However, after 8 years of marriage, we have accumulated quite a few things. But so far, it hasn't been too painful. I've had a year to check my heart and come to terms with the fact that we are moving and that this all needs to go, and that that is more than okay, it's totally necessary.
So, our friend Holly came today to take pictures, put a lock on the door, talk through some paper-work, and put a For Sale sign in our yard. This was much harder than I had expected. It just got very very real. I really really love our home. I really really love having a place to come to. A place that is safe, and comfortable, and familiar, and mine. But God is calling me away from this place. Because, after all, it is just a place right?
And so, I must trust Him, as I daily do, but now even more obviously so.
This has all just been a start, the slow beginning of what feels like a free-fall into a wide open chasm into something that I can't yet see, but trust will be amazing, albeit difficult and totally unfamiliar at times. We may not have a real, true place of our own for awhile, maybe not until we really get settled into a home in Burkina. Until then, we will be somewhat transient. We must be flexible. We will live wherever it is provided for us to live. Because we trust God. He has brought us faithfully this far, and He won't stop now.
God is calling me to abide. Abide IN Him. It reminds me of the word abode. We must abide in Him. I must find my rest, my peace, my calm, my comfort and familiarity in Him completely. I cannot put my trust in a house.
But I can still be sad at what we will eventually say goodbye to. This tangible, lovely, 1500 square foot perfect house that we have been so blessed to call home for over 8 years. Our garden, our back yard, the deck and fire-pit where possibly a few hundred smores have been created, the trees where Isaac likes to climb and hide. It's overwhelmingly sad to me today. There are many things I will grieve, this is just the start.