Black to Maroon...

"Long before Zaccheaus couldn't see Jesus, the tree was already planted to meet his need."

This summer has been full of heavy decisions and big changes for our little family.

Several years ago, we fell in love with a little yellow cottage right on the lake. A flagpole proudly displays an American flag smack dab in the middle of the back yard, the sunset falls every evening in perfect view from the back porch and in the mornings, the quiet lake is a place of peace and serenity that I visit as often as I can, accompanied by a book and cup of hot tea.

This little place of retreat is tucked into a quiet cove, where the front porch always saves me a seat on one of it's white rockers, and the lake out back always beckons one last kayak ride before bedtime.

Sound like a little slice of heaven?

Well, for us, it has been.

Our little lake cottage was always meant to be a weekend home. But, it's funny how God plants seeds in our path, the seeds sprouting with plans before we can even see that far into the future. Slowly our once a month weekend stay became an every weekend visit and our once a week visit had the boys asking everyday at school pickup "are we going to lake house?" This quickly turned from a question to, "mom, lets go to the lake house today!"

We kept bags packed and ready for our spur of the moment urges to be out at the lake, until finally we kept a second set of everything at the lake so that we didn't have to pack anything. Instead of a weekend home, we now had two homes in which we spent equal amounts of time at. This was a lot for my very particular home standards to keep up with. Never being at one place long enough to keep up with laundry or grocery shopping started wearing heavily. We began to feel like we had our School Life and our Lake Life.

We started to crave the simplicity of one home and one life.

The idea of leaving our community that we had come to love so dearly and so deeply seemed absolutely preposterous, simply out of the question.

Until, one day it just didn't.

Did we want to stay at one home just for a school or did we want to make the hard decision to see the bigger picture and completely pick up our lives as we knew them and make our happy place our one and only home. I shed many tears, spent many sleepless nights in prayer, had the same conversation over and over with Micah, the elephant of our decision never leaving the room.

One day, Micah said, "I think the right decision is the one neither of us want to make."

And I knew right then and there he was exactly right.

We had friends we loved dearly, I had relationships with the teachers and staff at the school, I had spent many days and years volunteering at a school I thought my boys would graduate from. I had hundreds of pictures I just knew would end up in senior slide shows one day. Our wardrobes were made up of black & white, representing the love we had for our school any chance we got. Micah often joked that we bled black for our Lindsay Knights. And y'all, we really did.

Leaving the school my babies started Kindergarten at had my momma heart broken in a million pieces. Who knows how many hours on the phone I spent with my mom trying to figure out a way to make this decision easy.

But the easy never came. We craved the peace making the decision would give.

I remember us looking each other in the eyes and saying, "Lets do it." Oh, how those three little words released layers of burdens off our shoulders.

The hardest part was telling our friends. I texted my good friends first and then I called my very closest friends. I cried alot that day, still not 100% that I could got through with our decision. The next day, we registered our boys at what would be their new school. Next I contacted our old principal.

It was then that it finally felt real.

I pulled out all our spirit t-shirts, had a quilt made from them, tore the Lindsay Knight off the back window of my car and slowly started incorporating maroon into our lives.

Two months later and I get little gifts of reassuarnce every day that seem to confirm our decision to move out here. The boys have now started school at a brand new school, double the size, full of faces they have never seen. But the crazy part is, the night after their first day of school, as Roen drifted off to sleep, he looked up at me and whispered, "Momma, I like Callisburg better than Lindsay." And my heart exploded.

There are days I still get nostalgic thinking about what we have left behind, but I have no doubt, buying this little place on the lake was God preparing us for this transition years before we even knew what was to come. I am a firm believer in making a decision and embracing it!

And every time I look out back and see these little shillouetes against the sunset, I have no doubt we are exactly where God wants us to be...