When God moves you . . .

We celebrated our one-year anniversary of moving to Missouri last week. It seems like just yesterday that we were saying tearful goodbyes to our family and friends in Kansas and packing up all our earthly belongings and making the eight-hour trip to Southeast Missouri. What a year it’s been! (For sure, we didn’t foresee a pandemic in our future!)

We sold our house to friends, a pastor’s family from our church in Wichita, we bought our new house from a pastor’s family in Missouri. [You can read that story HERE.] Southeast Missouri is very different from Kansas. There’ve been adjustments. To weather (aka humidity!), identifying trees and flowers, driving where not everything is on a grid and where everything is up or down a hill…and so much more.

But the bottom line? We love it here! Yes, we miss our families and friends back in Kansas, but Missouri already feels like home to us. After all, we’ve been coming here several times a year for the past twenty-plus years—ever since our oldest daughter decided to attend college at Southeast Missouri State, then fell in love and married a local guy, then talked her sister into attending college here where she fell in love and married a local guy and now six of our ten grandbabies live here! Of course, we’re home!

I always thought I was a Kansas wheat fields girl through and through, after all, I’m a Kansas wheat farmer’s daughter! Turns out I’m also a woodland hills and valleys girl through and through. Our backyard, with the deer who graze there every morning and evening, is like a little piece of heaven on earth.

So is the screened porch where we usually watch them from—like living in a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse!

We are especially thrilled to have had a cozy place to hunker down during this pandemic. But we’ve had some adventures too. We bought a camper van and traveled in it for almost two months last fall. We bought our Lectric bicycles and have loved exploring Missouri on them! So much so that we’ve sold our camper van to get something that will allow us to take our bikes with us when we travel. It looks like we might get to pick up our new “rig” this week!

When God prompts you to pull up stakes and move, it might be difficult, but He always knows what He’s doing! And here’s our latest proof! Grandbaby #10 made his entrance into the world July 13. Isn’t he a cutie?

Has God ever uprooted you from a place that felt like home? Have you learned to adjust to a new normal or even found a new place to call home? I’d love to hear your story!