back but not home

A month before we got the e-mail inviting us to the Philippines we put an offer in on a new house.

We love our little house in Spokane, but there are times that it indeed seems well, little.

We've committed to adding to our family through adoption and our little house just can't handle a family of 6, plus company that is always rolling through, plus trying to have our door open to Moody students and events.

We could barely fit 6 around our table.  It sits in a nook.  I call it our dinning nook.  It makes is sound cute and cozy, don't you think?  Our nook has one end of our table against the wall and if we have more than 5-6 people around it we have to pull it out from the wall which leaves half of it hanging into the living room and then the light that used to hang over the middle of the table hangs over the head of the person sitting between the table and the wall.

And Kellan's room.  Well lets just say that we know lots of people that have a bigger master closet than Kellan's room.  It makes me claustrophobic just thinking of putting bunk beds in there.

It was a God thing that the offer fell through on the house we were intending to buy.  There is no way we would have packed up a brand new-to-us house and moved halfway around the world.

We did pack up our house though before we left Spokane.  Down to the last washcloth and toothpick.  We decided that if God used this year to move us back overseas then we would be ready to go and if He used this year to move us back to Spokane we would be ready to look for houses again. It sounded like such a great plan back then.  It's back to Spokane we go.  

So while a piece of me is excited to be heading back, the fact that as of this time we have no where to physically go back to can cause me just a tiny bit of stress.  Right now our house is being rented out and we'd like to keep it that way if at all possible.  So when we pull into town we go.......where? A hotel, an apartment, a friend's basement??  As excited as we are to get "home" it feels like we're not going home, we're just going back.

I started looking at houses online in an effort to torture myself.  I of course found one I liked and had already mentally hung our pictures on the wall and last week the house listed as pending.  As in almost sold.  Punch to the gut.  After a week or so I realized that I wasn't so much in LOVE with the house, but I needed a place for my mind to go when it pictured us back in Spokane.

Right now when I picture us stepping out of our car, the picture in my mind just goes blank.  When I picture getting out of bed, it goes blank.  When I picture walking through the front door, it's just blank.  It feels like such an exercise of faith to just let it be blank and not fill it up with what I want to make happen for our family.

I know God has a plan for where He wants us to live, just like He had a plan for that house to fall through.  It's just having the patience to wait and see what He gifts us with.