I write this from the living room of our cute Airbnb we are staying at for the week. The house is quiet and I am sipping my morning coffee as I watch the sky get lighter and lighter. I’m reflecting on all that has happened and I thought I’d try to bring you up to date a bit.
We left our house for the last time a week ago today. We packed up and moved in 3 days time. It was crazy, stressful, and rushed but we have the most amazing friends and a big God! We stored all our canned goods, washer, and things that couldn’t freeze in the basement of a friend’s house. We plugged our freezers in at another friend’s home. We loaded the rest in a uhaul and took it 2 hours north to a storage unit to wait for our rental house to be available. We had help packing and loading, people brought food, friends prayed for us, and we felt incredibly carried and loved.
We spent the last week in an Airbnb apartment in a town in ND about an hour and a half from where we used to live. We rested, prayed, cried, forgave, cooked meals, played games together, did laundry, took the kids to the park across the road, and allowed our hearts to heal and adjust to this sudden upset. It was a week we all needed. Sometimes there is no fixing it, you just need to hold each other and cry.
Yesterday we traveled 5 hours south to Billings, MT to spend the next week. My birthday, our daughter’s birthday, and our anniversary are all this week. I will turn the big 3-0, our daughter will turn 10 (double digits! 🤯) and my husband and I will celebrate 12 wonderful, adventurous years together. We will take the kids to an indoor water park, to a movie (they’ve only been to a movie theatre once,) and do some shopping while we are here. It is so rare that we do things like this and we live so far from shopping that this is quite the treat. I am so thankful for this time off in between places that we get to enjoy each other and be together. In some ways it is hard to be in between homes and lives, but I’m enjoying this unexpected vacation and transition period.
Now on to the story of how this all happened ...
A few weeks ago my husband got a message on Facebook from someone he didn’t know asking for his current contact info for this person’s boss. After a few messages back and forth to try to place who this person’s boss was and how they knew of my husband, he realized it was a former business acquaintance from when we lived here before. After getting my husband’s current contact info, he called and told my husband about a job opening 2 hours north of us that he thought my husband would be perfect for. It was a general manager for a grain elevator right down the lines of my husband’s experience, training, and education. They had not advertised the position yet but this guy had been talking to the CEO of the company and mentioned my husband to him as a prime candidate for this job. He hadn’t spoken to my husband in years (we had moved away and my husband wasn’t working in grain during those years) so we aren’t sure why he thought of my husband during that conversation other than the Lord bringing it to his mind. He asked for my husband’s resume to forward on for the position, if my husband was interested. My husband came home from work that evening and told me about what had happened. We were both in shock and confused by what this all meant and how out of the blue it was. My husband wasn’t looking for a job as he had a one year commitment at the hotel and that wouldn’t be up until May. We were set to close on our house in a couple days. Everything seemed settled. It never crossed our minds that we would live anywhere else in MT than where we were currently at. But we have walked with the Lord long enough to see His fingerprints on things like this and know that He knows much more about our lives than we do. We have learned to trust Him and know that He sees what is coming ahead before we even have a clue. The very next day after this phone call, our house deal started crumbling. The owner claimed he didn’t sign papers that he did, changed the terms of the buy/sell and said if we didn’t agree to the change then the house deal was off the table. We were in shock. We never expected him to pull something like that. He was a longtime friend and my husband’s boss. But the timing - it was so hard to overlook the timing of it all. How was it that my husband got a job offer for a job he didn’t apply for the day before everything started falling apart?! Coincidence? I think not. As we grappled with what all this meant and what we were to do, the lady at the abstract office randomly took a trip and that pushed closing back another week. We saw that the Lord was giving us time to make a decision. During that week, we took the time to pray over the house deal and had come to agreement that we weren’t comfortable pursuing the deal with someone who was being dishonest. As that decision was made, my husband had two interviews and was formally offered the job up north. When my husband told his boss that we would not be buying the house due to the change in agreement, his boss flew into a fit of rage and fired my husband. He legally had to give us 30 days to move from the house, but due to things he said and some very erratic behavior, we no longer felt safe remaining there. We were floored at how God provided and watched out for us. We had no idea what type of person he really was until all this started coming out, and the relief we felt at knowing that God had seen all of this coming and had made abundant provision for us before we even knew we needed it!
Our rental will be available in a couple weeks to move into and my husband will start work April 1st. We are very thankful for this in between time to adjust and heal and be together as a family before stepping into our next adventure.
A few fun facts ...
1. When we first moved to MT in 2012, we moved to a little town 20 minutes away from where we are going to be living now. We lived there a year before transferring down to the reservation to work at another grain elevator. We met some really neat friends that we have stayed in touch with over the years and I’m very excited that we already have connections and friends there. 2. The town has 186 people, a grain elevator, school, post office and diner. It’s tiny, remote, and we’ve met about 1/4th of the population already. 😂
3. The town is 8 miles south of Canada. 🥶
Thanks for following along with our story. We are very excited about this next season, both for what we do know and what we don’t know yet. I look forward to sharing more of our life as it unfolds.
Blessings,
Grace