Renee Emerson

Our moving date just got pushed back half a week, much to my dismay, which means the week and a half I’d planned on taking off school is turning into twoish weeks and getting us a little behind. On one hand, homeschooling in the midst of boxes and chaos, shifting states and shifting belongings, probably tips the scale from Bold to Crazy, but nevertheless, I plan on getting a week done between the tail-end  of this week and the beginning of another.

For one, homeschool lends structure to our rather shapeless days. All our goodbye playdates and lunches have been had. We’ve said goodbye and cried and hugged and to go through it again and again is hard on the heart. So though I’d love more time with all our friends and loved ones, I’d like less goodbyes. If you see us, you see us, these last few days. And if we are doing school, we are doing something. Something check-markable, something moving us forward while everything else is stalled.

In my favor: we are doing kindergarten and second grade, not rocket science. Also our curriculum (Playful Pioneers) is super fun and all about adventurous pioneers moving from place to place. I’ll confess I nearly cried when reading a story about Daniel Boone, when Mr. Boone said “We Boones never stay in one place for long.” That is just like us, I told the girls.

But I hope this time that we will. There’s this longing for FOREVER. When we bought our current home, I thought (and said), “this is our Forever house”. I painted each wall thinking “forever, forever, forever.” We hung up the swings thinking “bbqs, parties, grandkids”. And that wasn’t the case. We’ve been here six months and here we are again, labeling and boxing up everything we own.

I don’t think we are fools to wish for Forever. We are made for Forever, goodbyes are unnatural. At the same time, I know often God calls his people to wander–he has work for us in more than one city, in more than a handful of lives. I do not doubt that this move is bringing us to another sphere we are meant to influence.

It is in those relationships and friendships where we can find Forever–souls are the only eternal things we interact with in this entire wide world. Not a hometown. Not a physical church, or a favorite restaurant, or frequented park. Hevel, hevel, hevel, right?

This is why Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the bible, and I’m convinced that though there are a good many Christians called to live lives in a twenty mile residence, there are also a number of us that God made a little adventurous, a little willing to take a chance and start over, because isn’t starting over truly a Grace, a God-given Grace, no matter how nice a place you come from?