A New Chapter for Our Family | Part One

OUR BACKSTORY: THE HOUSE WE LOVED

So first, a bit of backstory.

If you know us in real life, then you know we lived in a house and a town we absolutely adored, and honestly, we wanted it to work for our family forever. It was a tiny house, but it was so cute and we had worked hard to slowly remodel and renovate it over the years until it was just as we wanted it. And it was a house that had sheltered us through so much change and transition in our lives.

We bought it in 2007. We were so young and eager and excited to be homeowners. It was the perfect size for us, and located in an adorable town about 30 minutes from our state capitol. We bought it just before the housing bubble popped, so within a year of owning it, the property values tanked and getting a mortgage got a lot harder. We’d snagged it just in the nick of time.

When we decided to move to South Sudan in 2011, we initially thought we’d sell our house. We didn’t want to, but it seemed like a cleaner, easier process than trying to rent it out and deal with managing it from abroad. But the housing market in our state was still atrocious, with an ongoing foreclosure crisis, so our house wasn’t worth much. My parents agreed to manage it for us, so in the end we rented it out.

That ended up being a huge blessing, because there was our little house, familiar and beloved, waiting for us when we came home from the mission field broken and hurting. It was a soft place to land in a community where people already loved us, had been praying for us, and were ready to help us process what we’d been through. We were known and we were seen in a place that felt safe and secure.

And in that season of life, those were things we needed the most.

In the few years that followed, we brought our next two babies home from the hospital to that house. We walked the floors at all hours of the night, we cheered as they took their first steps, and we danced through the rooms as a family. We hosted small groups and guests, we welcomed friends and neighbors, and we crammed our families in for birthday parties.

We lived and loved in that house. And even though it was just sticks and plaster, our little house felt like a warm embrace.

OUTGROWING OUR TINY HOUSE

Eventually, we had 3 kids and only 2 bedrooms. After having lived in a camper for a year and then in South Sudan for 2 years, Blaise and I were really okay with our family living in a house that most Americans considered way too small. We knew how to maximize storage spaces, and we even had the lyrics “love grows best in little houses” hanging up in our living room.

We assumed that once Little Miss was ready to move out of our bedroom and into her own room, we’d put her crib in the boys’ room and they’d all share a room. But she was kind of a light sleeper and the boys tended to be a bit noisy at bedtime. It ended up not working out as well as we’d hoped.

So in the fall of 2020, Blaise and I converted a corner of our unfinished basement into a bedroom and we moved our bedroom downstairs so Little Miss could have her own room. It was less than ideal, and I was forever paranoid about having the kids on the ground floor and us in the basement. Between the bedroom situation and the tiniest backyard ever, we finally reckoned with the fact that we had squeezed every bit of space out of the house that we could. But we were still bursting at the seams. We finally considered the possibility that we’d have to move.

But that was a tough decision, because it wasn’t just our house that we loved. We also loved the town we lived in (officially considered the “exburbs”), with its monthly car shows and hand-dipped ice cream shop on the square. There were sidewalks to almost everywhere, people were always out walking and riding bikes, and there was a lovely nature park just down the hill.

But we especially loved our neighbors-turned-friends. We had a great church community and support network – all mostly within walking distance, the city and all its conveniences nearby, and really fast internet. (Oh, how I miss that internet!)

I honestly didn’t want to move. Like, ever.

And still, as I type this, my heart aches thinking about what we left behind.

A BURDEN FELT & SIMULTANEOUSLY IGNORED

In late 2019, just a couple of months after Little Miss was born, God had begun to stir my heart about moving closer to my dad, who wasn’t in great health (and whose health has only continued to decline). The problem with that was it meant moving back to the cornfields where we grew up (Blaise and I were high school sweethearts).

And there was nothing I wanted to do less. Literally nothing.

I’m not sure where those feelings came from, but sometime between my idyllic childhood and my teenage years, I came to absolutely loathe the rural community I grew up in. I dreamed of moving to the city, where I’d have career opportunities, could wear cute shoes without getting them muddy just walking to the car, and would be surrounded by culture and plenty of things to do. I could not wait until I graduated to get the heck out of dodge.

I wince when I think back to the young woman I was, with her priorities all sorts of upside down.

Anyway, because I had no desire to ever move back to this community, I basically just resolved to ignore any thoughts or feelings I had that God may be calling us back here. When we finally made the difficult decision to sell our beloved tiny house and move, I didn’t ask God where He wanted us to land. I asked that He would help us find the perfect house just outside of the town we already lived in. I wanted the best of both worlds: to live in the country, but to be close enough to the city to enjoy its amenities.

And any time I heard His still, small voice calling me here, I simply did everything I could to drown it out.

I’m a real model of faithful obedience, aren’t I?

I mean, once upon a time I opened my heart and my hands and I told God to send me – that I’d go anywhere He told me to go. And I went to South Sudan and I lived there for 2 years and I gave birth to my oldest son there. And I would have stayed longer had there not been a war and loads of trauma and the need to come back to the State to heal.

But I digress.

Moving back to this rural community that raised me was the one place on earth that I was – apparently – not willing to go.

War-torn Africa? Yes.
Rural town Midwest? No.

A SERIES OF EVENTS

But then, in Winter 2020-2021, a series of events converged that began to change my heart.

First, at every turn, our attempts to buy a house in the exburbs failed.

We were extremely disheartened by the crazy real estate market, the high and only getting higher housing prices, and the fact that every cornfield surrounding our town seemed to go to developers to be turned into subdivisions. There was a real risk that we’d buy a house “in the country” only to end up hemmed in by subdivisions. That was the first thing that made us pause and take a hard look at what staying in the exburbs might mean.

Second, I read 2 books in a row that wrecked me and made me deeply consider being obedient to where God might be calling us.

And if you know our story of moving to South Sudan, then you know that books factoring into our decisions is kind of trend. The two books this time were Jayber Crow and A Big Gospel in Small Places.

Jayber Crow painted rural, small town life in a completely different light than I had ever seen it before. It made me yearn for a time and a place that I will never experience. But it also made me rethink the value of rural communities in America – which I’d largely dismissed. (And honestly, the hypocrisy of it…because I was willing to move to a small village in the middle of nowhere in South Sudan. But here in America? Not a chance.)

And then there was A Big Gospel in Small Places. That one was so convicting page after page that I kept wanting to just throw it away, because the author’s words were just so true. And all it did was shout at me the things God had been whispering for over a year. There is a desperate need for the gospel in rural America. While many churches and parachurch ministries focus on urban ministry (also desperately needed), much of rural America is silently forgotten and left behind.

But the people here are dying without knowing Jesus, too. There’s poverty, addiction, domestic violence, and brokenness here, too. And while there are some thriving rural churches here and there, the more familiar tale is about the churches whose memberships and attendance slowly dwindled until they were finally forced to close their doors.

And just as it did when we were praying about moving to South Sudan to share the gospel, Romans 10 was once again haunting me with, “How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.‘”

So while it began with a desire to be nearer to my dad, God was steadily softening my heart toward this rural community and placing in it a desire to be His hands and feet here.

Side note: My husband is such a steady rock. He’d actually begun feeling called out here in 2018, but he knew for sure that I’d not even entertain the possibility. So he prayed and waited. When I first voiced that I was feeling led here, he didn’t get too excited or pushy, lest he spook me off. He simply waited for me to wrestle with God and flesh all of this out for myself. It’s the Holy Spirit working in him to have THAT much patience with me!

And third, we found our dream house.

Blaise (and God) had finally convinced me to at least look at our options out in this rural area. So we did. I was still pretty skeptical that I’d actually be willing to make the move. But it felt fairly harmless to see a few houses, especially because it seemed unlikely that we’d find one worth moving for.

We looked at exactly three. And bought the third one. And the way it all happened was too perfect to be anything other than God.

Whenever Blaise and I would dream of a house (this is, if we weren’t saying we’d like to transplant our beloved tiny house to a bigger property), we would describe this house. The one I’m sitting in now as I write. We wanted an old, Craftsman bungalow on at least an acre. We wanted built-ins, a fireplace, a big front porch, enough bedrooms for all of us, and ideally, some sort of mudroom (because kids are messy, y’all).

I jokingly say that God bribed us with this house to get me move here.

But I’m kidding.

I think.

Because not only is the house exactly what we’ve always dreamed of, but even the story of how we found it has God’s fingerprints all over it.

TO BE CONTINUED…