. . . and God laughs

One day I will fill in the gaps and tell the thousand stories that come before our current family journey.  But, until then, just understand that our lives as a family from the very beginning have been a series of changed plans.  This step in our life as a family is no different.

We are not really city folks, we live in rural West Virginia – very, very rural – but not a farming community.  It’s not that we haven’t ever thought of farming, the house, the barn, a horse . . . But, at 30 years of marriage, after a couple of college degrees between us, I kind of thought that was not our journey to take.   A brand new house in the place that most felt like home to me when I was growing up; where my mother, sister, brother, myself, and four of my 6 children have graduated school – Those things just don’t suggest that a very large change is underway.  You know, I kind of thought things were winding into that comfortableness that I like.  Well, I like it for a little while – then I am bored.

But, apparently, my husband’s midlife crisis will not hold a girlfriend and a sports car but a faraway field, cows, goats, tractors and organic vegetables!  So, the last two months of my life have been a blur of farm searches, changing our ideas, offers, denials, changing our ideas again, ag conferences, online learning, family meetings and on and on and on.  I could be characterized as somewhere between slightly and completely ambivalent about this whole scale revamp of my current lifestyle – except that I love my husband and want to be wherever he wants to be, and somehow I love the idea of the end product we may come away with – eventually!  It’s the in-between that is hard to surrender to God.

So, I’m just going to let you in on a little secret.  Writing is what I do when I don’t exactly know what else to do.  It is how I pray.  It is how I sort out stuff.  I welcome you to join the crazy journey if you wish.  It will be interesting – because God never seems to allow my life to be dull for very long.  And, it will be real – I just write what I live.  It will sometimes be very funny – because my family is hilarious sometimes, mostly without meaning to be.

It is just a journey.  One journey.  I invite you to share the journey with us and laugh at our mistakes, laugh at our learning process, laugh at our brand of crazy and maybe learn something helpful along the way.

I make plans,  . . . and God laughs!