Year One

How does one sum up a year....

Where are there words to do justice describing the things that we've seen..the things that we've felt..the miraculous blooming in the desert all around us?

I've been meaning to write a thousand different times, but I never felt like we had an "ending" to the story.   And maybe that's the whole point, there are no endings, just a constant kaleidoscope of life...

This year of ours would make one heck of a Hallmark movie...So I guess, we just start from the beginning:

When we moved here, we were pretty broken..Life had punched us in the gut,knocked the wind out of us all.  But through all of the horrible dark times, God was there.  We felt Him like we have never felt His presence before: telling us it'll be ok, He had a plan, just keep trusting.  So we did (honestly, we had nothing left to hold onto but Hope so don't think of us as some giants of the faith or something).  

Throughout the summer before our move, God blessed Jim's business beyond measure.  He went from a couple of construction jobs a year to like 20 in a summer!  No one knew what was brewing below the surface of our lives, they all just needed construction work done.  We had heard a message on Elisha and the jars of oil.  Jim and I decided that, like the widow, we would set out "jars" to be filled..as long as Jim had jobs coming in, we stayed in IL.  

Our first move date was in July..then August...Then October..and Finally November...

We sold what we could, donated countless truckloads to Goodwill, and in the end..we packed up our lives into a 16 foot job trailer.  We said goodbye to the best friends a family could ever have...left our close knit family that we loved so dearly...and headed west.  All of the oil jars provided more than enough to move and begin with a comfortable fresh start. 

The desert was going to be our Promised Land...I guess that I should have reread that story before clinging so tightly to the whole Promised Land notion...



Blessed is the one who trusts in Me Alone...
He is like a tree rooted near the stream...
Not fearing heat or drought,
But staying green and fruitful-No Matter What It Faces.

Jeremiah 17:7-8 (the Shelly paraphrase)