Leaving Home

I have to apologize for not blogging so much this month. We're closing on our home and just moved out... yesterday as a matter of fact. It's somewhat bitter-sweet, because part of me understands it's just a building, a bunch of lumber, and it's fading away just like anything else in this world. But it's also been more than just a place to hang your hat.
The steps, where my boy took his first major tumble in his walker, scared us to death.
The dining room where Abby was chewing on sweet corn from the garden when she was just a baby.
In the living room is where Logan accepted Christ into his heart, and on the hardwood floor in the kitchen is where my little girl figured out how to twirl in her Sunday dress...

I remember the day we had to bury our kitty in the back yard after a run-in with a dog...my son sitting with droopy shoulders on the front porch, fighting back the tears and yet happy to see me because he thought that I was going to fix his cat and make her all better.

I remember taking off the training wheels for my girl this summer as she flew down the sidewalk and took her spill into the grass. I remember putting the training wheels back on after that. :)

All of the Christmas mornings and the snowball fights, the Easter Egg hunts and the birthday parties, the early hours spent listening to the birds, sipping coffee with Kari on the back porch, smelling the lilacs bloom.

It's hard because we have a tendency to tie all of those great moments in life to a place. But really, when you think about it, the house is not really where those memories live. Those memories have a home in my heart. And it's the people that we get to spend this precious life with that really matter. They make the memories, not the house.

Christmas will still come and we'll still color funny looking eggs in the Spring. The seasons will still be sprinkled with cake and ice cream and there will still be notches on some wall, somewhere, marking the passage of childhood. With a little luck, there will be some pictures to remind the crumbsnatchers that they were, in fact, crumbsnatchers when they are older.

But as for the rest, it's just a matter of putting our trust in the only real constant. Setting our compass so we know where we're going and where we've been.

That True North is Christ, and everything else along the way is just a road from here to Him.

Happy Trails.