Last week we drove the last leg of our trip back to Montana, a 2 and a half hour jaunt coming from North Dakota. We topped the rise in the otherwise straight and flat road and the tops of the two grain elevators came into view, the first indication of the town we knew lay just ahead. This was our town now. Those elevators were where my husband would be working - evidence of the abundance of grain grown on these Plains by hardworking, multigenerational farmers. As the rest of the town came into view, I got flashbacks of when we moved to this area 9 years ago, only then it was to the town 25 minutes away from where we are now.
We were living in Idaho at the time in an area we really didn’t like and my husband was working for $13.25/hour as the sole provider for our family. Wages were low and cost of living was high. We had wanted to move to Montana for a couple years and had looked for jobs to no avail. We made it a matter of prayer and left it in the hands of the Lord. We had been married almost 3 years, had a 10 month old baby, my dad had suddenly passed away earlier that year, and life felt a bit adrift for us. It was the end of 2011, a few days after Christmas, when I happened to find a job posting on Craigslist for a grain elevator in Montana. The Montana part caught my attention right away and my husband had all the grain experience they were looking for for that position. It would pay $20/hour plus overtime. I showed my husband that night when he came home for supper. We prayed about it and decided it was a long shot but it couldn’t hurt to put in his application. He submitted it that night and the next morning at 7:30 he had a phone call from them to set up a phone interview for later that day followed by a job offer. Within 2 weeks we had packed up our little trailer house in the back of our pickup and small trailer and headed for a little town just south of Canada that we hadn’t ever heard of before.
We rolled into the town in a blizzard during the first part of January 2012. Before we moved over we had found the local newspaper online and saw an advertisement for a one room cabin for rent. We called the number and rented it sight unseen over the phone. It was during the height of the Bakken Oil boom and the town was crawling with trucks and men and housing was impossible to find. We were very fortunate to have even found housing, let alone on such short notice. We had no idea how the Lord was already looking out for us and taking care of us. We hadn’t realized that our phones wouldn’t work here and we had no idea where our little cabin was located. We pulled into the one and only little grocery store while we figured out what to do and where to go. Out of the store came an older man who walked right up to our pickup and asked if we were the people moving in from Idaho. He was the guy we had rented the cabin off of! He told us to follow him back to his farm where the cabins were located and that’s how we arrived at our first home in Montana. A day after we got here, I walked to our landlord’s house to use his landline to call my mom and let her know we were here and everything was fine. Looking back, we were kind of crazy to do what we did but we trusted God to take care of us and what adventures we have had!
We quickly acclimated to this new little town in the middle of the prairie that was bustling with activity. It was a world away from the culture and life we had always known. I loved how different everything felt to me. There was an electric buzz in the air, the excitement of a current day frontier. The Canadian flag flew under the American flag on almost every flagpole and the stores displayed signs saying, “Welcome, Canadians!” in their windows. Border patrol vehicles peppered the traffic through town and our closest big town was across the border in Canada.
We waited in line for hours at a makeshift DMV office set up in the basement of the courthouse in order to get our drivers licenses and become legal residents of this State that had stolen our hearts a couple years before. We got cell phones with the only provider for the area, a local phone company that only services a territory of rural towns in eastern MT. We learned where to buy things in the little mom and pop stores that have a little bit of everything in them and how to function in this rural area. The hardware store sells eggs and steaks. The pharmacy has a clothing section. The gas station has laundry facilities. The courthouse doubles as a library and makeshift DMV. The feed store is also a tire shop.
We lived in that one room cabin for a few months until we found an apartment to move into. We thrived in that little town. We met some incredible friends and attended a little country church with some of the most sincere people. That’s a whole other story for a later date of how we ended up at that church. We lived in this area for a short and very sweet year before my husband took a job 2 hours away on the reservation where we just moved up here from. It’s odd to feel like things have come full circle again. I’m not sure what all the plans and purposes the Lord has in bringing us to this area again, but I’m just so thankful that He does and that He is working all things together for my good. I don’t know why some things happened and I don’t have many answers at this point. But I know that God is so good. I can’t say I’m mad at all about being in this rural place again with these amazing friends in the area I first fell in love with Montana. I’m thankful and incredibly blessed and I am going to enjoy with all my heart the goodness God has placed before me. We never know what the future holds. But right now? That’s the gift I’ve been given and I intend to live it to the fullest.