Home

I have learned over the years that I adapt very quickly to my surroundings. In a hut in the jungle, house sitting in a mansion, in a cabin in Colorado, it's all the same to me. Wherever I am, I am at home. But there's something different about leaving a home you've known and knowing you'll never return. When we moved out of our little apartment last Saturday I was almost sad. The place where our life together began, where we spent our first Christmas together, where we found out we were having a baby. In just a year so many memories were made there. When we dropped the keys in the slot on the office door at 10:00 last Sunday night and drove away, I felt homesick. But it was time.
Now, I'm settling in to our new home and looking forward to the memories we will have here. Bringing Selina home with us in just a few weeks will hopefully be the first of many happy times that make a home feel like a home. I feel a great sense of accomplishment as a walk through each room and see the (almost!) finished result of all of our hard work. When I opened all of the windows this morning to let in the beautiful fall air, sat snugly on the sofa with a cup of coffee and closed my eyes, I felt almost giddy about the new beginning. Yes, this place too will be my home.

Changing of Seasons

This time last year I was in the home stretch of planning the most significant day of my life. My wedding day. As I walked along the bluff on a cool afternoon this past week I looked down to the spot some of my bridal portraits were taken. It was about this time last year, just as we were getting some cool days, that I was there looking out over the river in my wedding gown trying to imagine what it would be like to be a wife.
Seasons have changed from fall to winter to spring to summer and now coming back to fall. As the months have gone on I am amazed anew at God's faithfulness. I think back to a year ago and find it hard to remember what it was like to not be married to Cole. Now, with our first daughter due two days before our fist anniversary, I have different questions. What will it be like to be a mother? What will she look like? How will our lives change because of her? I don't worry, though. Because I know through all of the challenges and changes of my life, God has been faithful.
Sometime in the next 9 weeks, my life will change forever - again. And though I know that will bring good things and difficult things, God will be there and he will sanctify me through it.
As I write, our little baby girl squirms and moves within me and I think of something that a friend of a friend said years ago in a paper he wrote: "Remember that you are a living chalice which will one day bear souls for which Christ died to save. There is no greater calling in life than that." At the time I first read that I was about 15, but it has stuck with me. When I hear her heartbeat, feel her move, or try to imagine holding her in my arms for the first time, I know this is part of why I was created. To give her life, and prepare her to live eternally serving our God. What a privilege! What a responsibility! Ready or not, here she comes :)