[part zwei] the great un-move.

so it just came down to a decision. we had to decide what to do. standing there in the living room of the kooky old house, with half the room already filling up with items that our faithful family members were carrying through the front door, we had to decide: do we stay here or do we go back? do we unpack the cargo and move in? i mean, that was the plan and the end goal of the previous weeks of packing- to MOVE IN. how could we not? how could we really, honestly load everything back onto the trailer and move BACK in to where we came from? it seemed nuts. it seemed like we would look nuts to even be considering another option besides moving in here.

why did everything seem different, and therefore worse, than when we'd first seen the house? was the previous tenant's furniture strategically placed to hide all the home's gaping faults? were those armchairs intentionally placed in front of the smoky tendrils of burn marks winding their way out of the furnace grates in the floor? was that sideboard in the kitchen meant to mask the melted linoleum on the floor in front of the heater?

what was it that made us feel different and so incredibly tumultuous inside? the exposed wires dangling from the bathroom walls? the naked, ungrounded outlets in the back room? the stale stench? the broken windows? the removed pipes from the washing machine? again, the burn marks coming out of the heating grates?

those are all things that scared me; they really struck fear in my heart. and they weren't there before, at least not that our eyes could see. and that's just it- our eyes couldn't see. our eyes couldn't see what was best for us. we were standing there because we'd carefully considered and weighed options, and been intentional and thoughtful, and prayed. we didn't know how it could not be right.

but i think it took something that our eyes could see to tell us what our eyes couldn't see.

there are just times when HE speaks and HE says a word, and we don't know why, but we have to move. literally.

aside from all its broken aspects, i still saw redeeming qualities about this kooky old house in wallingford. i loved it's crooked and creaky wooden floors, and it's weird paint job in the kitchen, and the turquoise tile in the bathroom and the fact that it was just old. i have such a penchant for the old; i think it's lovely.

there was just something that spoke more than the visual could. it wasn't going to be our home.

we took forever deciding what to do. in the heat of the day, we ate lunch on the prickly, dry grass out front and we looked up at the house and thought about what to do. we walked inside. we stood outside. we tilted our heads sideways to get a different view. we screwed up our eyes and sqinted at it. it didn't change. nothing changed. nothing felt any less confusing or any more clear.

so matt just picked up the phone and called the landlady, to whom we had just written a check for oodles of money (or what feels like it to us), and said that he's sorry but that we couldn't live here.

i cried. and my brother mitch told me that whatever we decided would be the right thing. and that really meant the world to me.

our family was so fantastic. matt's parents laughed and said that they'd done crazier. and tim just starting strongly taking loads of stuff back out to the trailer. then grom spilled my lemonade so i cried some more. and i thanked matt for calling the landlady, even when i hadn't said i had wanted him to.

overall, it just felt miserable. but somehow we just kept moving. everything was loaded and we locked the house back up, and we drove away. back up north with the same household items tethered in the backs of pickups and on a trailer and filling up the trunk of my brother's car.

we pulled into our familiar driveway in mukilteo and one of the neighbors said, "hey, isn't that the same stuff that came out of your house earlier?"

"yep," we said.

everything ended up in piles filling up all the empty room in our town house. my long-sought-after organization was in shambles, but who cared. at least it was there.

joanne cooked us dinner with what she could find in our fridge; she always amazes me with the tasty concoctions she can whip up out of nowhere. all six of us sat out on the back patio getting eaten by mosquitoes and ate our dinner and we didn't talk about what to do next, we just ate dinner.

afterwards my brothers left and i thanked them for their help, and they drove back to ellensburg. matt's parents stayed for a little bit. we cleared spots on the couch to sit. mark said he thought what we were really after was some peace, not so much the adventure. that maybe we'd had too much adventure over the last couple of years and were just pining for some quiet consistency, really. and that sounded about right. it sounded like that could be why we felt the way we did earlier at the new house.

one of the biggest things matt and i have taken away from some valuable conversation with our old pastor, tommy was that we don't need to own the pressure of choosing ourselves in and out of HIS will. we don't need to live worrying about trying to make the right decisions in order to keep ourselves in line with a will that's already been layed out for us. it's like this: ultimately, God's not necessarily going to care whether we chose to stay at the house in wallingford or that we moved back to the condo in mukilteo. his will isn't either-or... either the wallingford house or the mukilteo one. HIS will is that we love HIM... follow HIM... enjoy HIM... walk with HIM... and we could do that in either place.

really, nothing about this situation made any sense to us for a few weeks. after we lived out of boxes for awhile, we began to unpack and put things away. slowly, we put our home back together. covering up beige walls with friendly green paint gave us a feeling of discovery. where we were (where we are) was good for us. we can look out our windows and see peaceful green grass and trees and animals sometimes. we have just enough space for our things and room for guests. it is safe here and we don't worry about not being able to pay for things to get fixed because our landlord here has been receptive and helpful. we just started feeling like we were recreating a better home in the one that we had, and we were so thankful to be able to stay. and because our landlord realized it was better for her for us to stay, she dropped our rent by $200 per month. how's that for some confirmation that we did the right thing? what grateful hearts we had for every day that we began to discover why we stayed.

if this makes not one iota of sense to anyone else who reads it, i don't really mind. i want to have it written down for us to remember; to us, it matters. to us, it was a really hard decision and we are here, now really really thankful that we decided to come back. i've wondered before how i would respond in an unclear situation, if i ever heard HIM asking me to move. and i've been able to answer, in this, that yes i would. yes, we would. we will turn on our heels on run when it's not right, and we will run into the fray when it is right. we will do it.

we aren't going to live here forever. we dream about someday having our own home; one that we can really make ours. but i feel like, at least we're here until then. and at least it can feel like a haven, and like pure rest when we are here. at least we aren't worried about everything being broken and not feeling safe, just because it would have been in a hip, urban neighborhood. at least, for now, we can feel good about saying this is our home.

home is important when you are working really long days, and driving a lot, and when you need a place to walk into that makes your mind and body say, "ahh." matt is that, for me, in human form and this mukilteo house is that, for us, in brick and mortar. i'm so glad we stayed.




fevergeon moves: 7*
fevergeon homes: 5

*because of the great un-move, moving escapades 6 and 7 occurred inside of one day.