Nesting

When I was pregnant with the twins, I spent a lot of time at second hand stores buying them clothes of all sizes.  Then I would sit in their soon-to-be room and fold clothes and sort clothes while praying for what our family future held and what these two little ones would bring to our life.  I imagined what their personalities would be and what they would enjoy.  Each outfit brought another soft fabric that they would wear while I rocked them to sleep or snuggled them for naptime.  I used their clothes to process the huge life change that they would bring to our family.  And what a wonderful change it has been.

I'm doing it again.  Not awaiting the arrival of a new little one, but awaiting a huge life change.  We are potentially weeks away from moving our family of 7 to the United States.  A week from today we will enter the long-awaited interview that decides where we will be living a month from now.  After a year and a half of waiting, we are so ready to not live in this limbo anymore.

During this change I've been back to the thrift stores and the clothes buying.  One, because it is surprisingly cost-efficient to clothe my family in winter clothes from a country where we sweat year round.  Do you know that no one wants to buy a winter coat here?  Even name brand ones with the tags still on them?  No shocker.  But it means I can get them for $3 :)  That makes it worth the extra suitcase!  And two, becuase I'm nesting, I'm processing.  Somehow in clothes buying I get to imagine what each of my family members' lives will be like through this change.  I get to pray for the friends that they will make, the Sunday school class they will be in, the ways that they will grow and change.  And I get to pray for the tears that they will cry that have already started as they think about saying goodbye.

So many unknowns await us and we have no idea what this new season will bring.  We trust and cling to the fact that God's hand is in this and has been from the beginning.  We believe He has called us to this life change and He is the one who has opened doors up to now.  We have seen His hand in the timing, although we've been in Honduras months longer than we thought.  I've gotten to homeschool and spend some much needed time with my kids being mom.  I've watched them grow together and learn to better love and support each other.  Eliana me yesterday that she doesn't like it like it when all of her brothers and sisters aren't home.  "I happy Mami, my family best friends"  is what she told me when Nicolle walked in the door after being gone all day.  So we trust that this time has been good for us.

In the midst of trusting and waiting, we are also apprehensive.  We are walking into something that is all new for us.  A new culture that, although it was mine for a long time, is not really mine anymore.  And it has never been my family's culture.  We have lots of conversations about what things will be like, but that doesn't mean that we won't all do the wrong thing... about a thousand times.  But that's for another post.

For now we wait, and trust, and try to make it through this one last week of unknowns.  This week we dream and pray and imagine what God has in store for us.