John 3:8

I feel like through these past couple months, I’ve held on. I’ve worked through the sad and joy and the unknown and the packing and weighing and purchasing and selling and goodbyes and future hello’s. I have ridden the roller coaster. Tonight when we packed our kids up to stay at a friends house in town, I let go. Yaaa we need to clean our house, get rid of all the random extras that some call trash, I call treasure, and make sure we leave it well. But it hit me not having a home. 

No physical home. No safe place for my kids to sleep every night and make memories and remember memories. No place to go at the end of a long day and just beeee. Just hide amongst all the blankets and pillows and the old couch.

My oldest is one of routine. He loves the same thing. Boring. He loves the consistent, the known. So when we showed up to our friends and on his comfy blown up air mattress was his same pillow, blanket, sound machine, and sister, he seemed reassured. Ohhhh how I wish I was that simple. That ache…. To make sure we’re doing what’s highest and most loving for our kids. Oh man. Leaving our house was hard. I didn’t think it would be. 

We’ve been working on what we call home as a family. Now that we left our “home” I get to extra practice in my head and to my kids and to my heart. “Home is our family. Home is heaven.” On repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. 

So here I am, sitting on the floor by my kids air mattress, while they sleep and I cry. Thinking of the tattoo I want. Refining it in my head. I’ll think about it for years until Clair makes me just do it. 

I want clouds. I want John 3:8. I want KJB. I want, Follow the peace.

My dad loved clouds. He watched them while he drove for hours and listened to God. He maybe talked, but probably just mostly listened. That’s who he was. I remember asking him if I should go to Ethiopia when I had just found out he had cancer. His words, always, “Follow the peace.” Not a peace that means you get your comfortable house, or your blankets, or your routine, but a peace means when you don’t have it all, you’re insides are at rest. When it’s changing, there’s sadness, but a level of peace that makes the sadness sweet, the tears don’t burn, but they still fall. 

"The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so it is of everyone who has been born of the Spirit." 

So John 3:8. Just one of those verses he loved, one of so so many. May I be as one born of the Spirit, a cloud being blown into different shapes and directions and making people see Gods creativeness. May I not quite ever really know, but always know, because He’s my Abba. May I be as one who can be home with my family wherever the Spirit blows us, all the way up until heaven. May I be being filled up with what doesn’t run out forever. 

That’s how it’s done right? Following Him. Letting Him fill and lead and make us home? 

With hope, 

KJB.