HOME

I love new adventures…and this year certainly has brought many new adventures for our family. We were only 10 days into the new year when Todd was contacted about interviewing for a new job. He had been exploring some options so it wasn’t a total surprise, but the timing of everything was. Three weeks later he had started a new job and was commuting an hour and a half each way. Our house had been massively de-cluttered, the walls repainted, and wood floors that had been the plan for a long time quickly installed. The house was on the market, and we had put an offer on a home in Herriman—a town I had never even heard of when the year started. Oh yes, and my consistent morning puking let us know that baby number five that we had been trying to have for a long time had suddenly chosen now to join the family. Nearly every major life transition that we could imagine had begun in one month.

We moved into our new home at the end of March without having an offer on our home in Payson, and somehow—miraculously—we closed on our old home twelve days later. It was a time that we relied upon and felt the evidence of the grace of God every day. It was very clear that He had opened these doors because this is where he needed our family to be.

As the dust settled—literally and figuratively—I began to feel the reality of transplant shock. We had lived in Payson for 11 years. It was our HOME. Our lives were so entwined with the house, the neighborhood, and the people there that I felt almost hollow to have that gone. Life was a blank canvas and we needed to start again. I prayed about it intently, desiring to know what the Lord wanted me to do and be in this new season of our life. The answer came quickly and simply. My mission was to be a partner with Him and my family in creating a HOME. I had been working through my mind the difference between a house and a home in past months, but now it was front and center. My job was to make a HOME on this blank canvas.

So where do I start? What is a HOME? So many parts of home and family life were a matter of habit or ritual in Payson, and now all that had been placed in a blender and it was time to sort out what we wanted to continue, what we wanted to leave behind, and what we needed to add. I love a new adventure and this was it! This blog is a chronicle of my journey to discover what HOME is and how to make it a reality in our lives.