That time we moved… again – Part One

I’ve been talking in code these past few months, giving hints of our family’s struggle. Today I’m pulling away the veil and sharing that time we moved.

When times get tough, I cocoon. Maybe it’s the performer in me, but when the hard times hit – when the ugly happens in life, I have a tendency to hide away and wait until I’m a beautiful butterfly to emerge again with a big smile on my face.

We all have those seasons in life. Seasons of happiness and seasons of sadness.  Seasons of growth and change. But then there are seasons of pruning.

The latter has been our life for the past few months.

Here’s what happened to us.

Our Limewashed Home

April came with a huge dose of news.  Trent’s non-profit he worked for lost their funding which in turn lost him his job. It was a dose of dread that came on the tail end of major character growth for him. News with an extra wallop of ‘kick him while he’s down’.

I took on the role of supportive wife while he navigated his unsteady future, but felt helpless in my efforts.

And that didn’t stop the hurt from hitting the rest of us. We had to take a hard look at our lifestyle and weigh our options. Everything was on the chopping block for consideration.

We cut back here, trimmed expenses there, and reworked the budget again and again.

There was one issue that we couldn’t solve – education.

DIY Cast Iron Urn

In 2017, I stopped homeschooling the boys. We could have kept them at home and challenged them academically, but we felt it necessary that they face some hard knocks while they were under our roof. They needed to get dumped, deal with difficult classmates, or not make the basketball team.

Life is so much more than grades and gpas.

It’s about having all the tools in their belt once they cross that threshold to take on the world on their own. We wanted to help guide them through those struggles and build their character while we still had that opportunity.

So, last year they attended an excellent private school. And yes – those hard knocks came, along with tears and cheers, victories and failures all wrapped up in one epic school year.

When Trent lost his job, telling the boys that we couldn’t afford to send them back was the toughest thing we had to do. They took it well and understood our situation with the job loss, but it was oh-so-heartbreaking. At the end of the conversation, all of us were crying!

While that big budget cut helped with our finances, it didn’t solve the education dilemma. You see, the local high school we were zoned for wouldn’t work for our oldest and his academic needs.

Praying and pleading, kicking and screaming, we knew we had to move, even though it was the last thing we wanted to do. I think we hashed and rehashed this at least a dozen times trying to find a way to work.

I loved my Almost Farmhouse, our church family, and the perfect proximity to both sides of our families.

There were a lot of questions as to why these challenges came.

Even so, I knew that God had big plans for our little family with this change.

But what I didn’t know is that I would have a front row seat to God’s amazing work in Trent’s life.

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