Our Home, Our Fortress

I make really great plans.

In 2012, with 1 baby on the way and 3 bonus kids making frequent trips to our home we decided that 1400 sq feet was a little tight.

Our plans:

• List our little house two months before baby was due and either sell before he arrives or take it off the market.
• Find a house with a master suite downstairs and all the ever-loving-craziness of kid world upstairs.

Such great, well thought-out, careful plans. YET. Guess which of those plans worked out?!

All of ZERO.

Our Tito was born, so we were done trying to sell.  Except.  The day after I got home from the hospital, we got a call. An offer.  So- here we go.  Moving with a new born and post-partum hormones.  HOORAY.

THEN we started hunting.  There were many houses I literally walked in the front door, saw no master suite downstairs and walked back out. You know, because of my plans and all. Until the night I had a dream.  I had a very vivid dream that was simultaneously comical and heart-wrenching.  All my kids went upstairs and literally grew-up (to old people) while they did their life on “their floor” and RRL and I did life on ours.

NOPE.  My plans stink. I want my people close.

The very next day OUR (new) house popped up on my Zillow radar- I wouldn’t have even gone to look at it a day before because the playroom was downstairs and the master suite up.  But since I now knew my plans stink, when I saw the pictures of her, I KNEW she was ours.  This would be our place to do life together becoming our best selves right before each other’s eyes.

It was HARD to move.  I wrote all the feelings back then (“Saying Goodbye”.  Posts one. two. AND three).  But it was also good to move.  This is home.

Over the years, every room has been rearranged a dozen times to accommodate our family changes, the growth of our children and their new interests.  It has been prayed over, laughed in, loved in, (possibly fought in), and grown in.

And lately I’ve been kind of a wreck, because she has on her best dress and a new decoration in the yard.

I know it is just a home, but in many ways the Lord used this place to carry us through some of the hardest days.  The spaces where Elders prayed for us or invited us into ministry with them.  The things my Daddy fixed or the times both of our Moms cooked in our kitchen.  The board games and movie nights, and the running up and down the stairs for discipline.  The dancing in the kitchen and singing in the shower.  The transformation for three little loves from “I NEVER WANT TO LIVE HERE” to family and home and security.

Which is why a few of the things that have made her ours cannot be taken down or hidden away just because a stranger wants to look at my home.  Especially the scripture taped to the middle of the back door.  The words which have hung in that spot since the day in 2014 when I declared war on darkness and we all memorized those words of light together (John 1:1-5).  I care precisely zero if my marker writing doesn’t give curb appeal.  It will not be removed until someone (who now owns that backdoor) takes it down without my knowledge.  It is part of our fortress.

And just like that, I know.  A piece of us will stay here.  Like the empty fields of an old battleground, even the empty walls of our house will have a story to tell.  If the rocks can cry out, so can these floors that have been knelt on.

When we sell our house and say goodbye, I’ll leave a note for her new people.  It will simply say “Welcome to your new home” and, in the mantra words of a sweet friend,  “This is sacred space.”

ABL

PS- In case you don’t know yet, we are moving. FAR.  Post about that coming very soon. It’s not a secret, just a little harder to write.

PPS- If you know someone looking for a new home who thinks they REALLY need a master suite downstairs….  Tell them they might be wrong 🙂 and then send them our way.