Our New Home

We have moved to our new home in Redding and we are busy settling in.  We've been working non-stop for over a week! We get up, sit and have a cup of coffee (or two), and then we work all day until past bedtime.

Dwayne is enjoying his much, much shorter commute to work every day.  But before and after work and sometimes during the day, he is working to get us settled, too. Today, for instance, he will take a final load to the town dump on his lunch hour.

The only respites we get, if you can call them respites, are when we get to go outside and rake leaves or trim thorny branches to tend to our property.  Then we will take a half hour and go explore the land around our home.

We are delighted with every little mushroom, every interesting bump on trees, every bright clump of green moss. We are constantly explaining, "Oh!" and "Wow! Come see this!" Our spirits are soaking up the beauty of nature and we are thanking God for such a gift in this home.

And it isn't just the land. The home itself is just right for us.  It's dated, but in a way we actually like.  I am enjoying more square footage, especially in closet space. There are whole closets I haven't used yet.  The hallways are wider and that didn't seem like it would matter, but it feels amazing, kind of like pulling on your smallest jeans and having room in them, because your diet is really working.  Now we have a two car garage and we both park inside. And we have two, that's right, two fire places and we are plotting where to move the rocks in the yard for another fire pit outside.

We probably have another week of work, but the end is coming into sight. There are only a few boxes left in each room, only a few piles here and there, and only a few surfaces that remained to be cleaned.  But, of course, "the end" of this move is really just the beginning. Isn't it?  We will have to paint and make curtains and all that.  My room is a bright pink that I do not enjoy. And the girls' room is a bright blue, but they'd rather have it pink. And there are bigger home-improvement projects that will need to happen, eventually. But, thankfully, the house was in "move-in condition" and we are able to simply dump, donate, or situate the things we are keeping and start really living.

And while I will probably enjoy making this space more and more my own with wall colors and curtains, those things aren't really the stuff of life, are they? Soon, the real life God means for us to live here will begin. What will we learn here? I wonder. What will we do? Who will we meet?  Those are the things I look forward to the most. So I quickly unpack to get this place functional in order to support all the real life that is about to begin.