"Goodbye for Now."

I moved yesterday.

 
I cried for about half an hour after saying “Goodbye for now” to Al and Ella.
Oh those two. What little life-changers they are. Or as they would like me to say, “We don’t change lives. God changes lives. Sometimes he just uses his people.”
There is truth in that.

The beauty of “moving-tears” is that they mean you are going to miss something. That something was sweet or good or beneficial. It’s better than the opposite, which I have known as well. The “GET ME OUT OF HERE” squeals and smiles as you blaze out of town in an I’m-never-coming-back kind of fashion. Those really are miserable. If nothing else it says, “All was not well while I was here.”

So I can smile about the tears.

In thinking more about moving away or moving on and looking back with subsequent crying, I realized that I was not crying because I was sad. Oh sure, over the course of the whole process I did cry some of those tears, the ones that showed I was sad to go, but the ones I shed in my car yesterday? Those were thankful ones.

Thankful that I had the last few years in the first place. Thankful that God DID use his people to heal some of my wounds and show to me his various kinds of grace (I Peter 4:10), thankful that I was taken in, without questions, thankful that I now know what it is to be loved first, just like the Bible says that we love God because he first loved us. I rejoice greatly that I had that time, thanking him over and over again that the girl who moved out….was not the same girl that moved in.

And so my prayer was this: Let not your grace be to me without effect.

I pray the changes that were made are lasting changes. I pray that, like all those beautiful people I grew to love, that my life will show God’s various grace to others. That it all took hold. That it wasn’t in vain, in naught. Let me be not the same.

 All that said, I don’t really know what comes next. I mean, I have summer plans, but beyond that, I have no vision yet. Things have not been revealed. So here is to not knowing what’s coming, but to knowing the only thing I have realized I do know: God will be good. And he will be here.

 Some of these pictures will be repeats, but these are my favorites from life’s last “season.”

One of my many weddings from last summer.

Al and Ella's driveway. Love that place!

In San Antonio, Texas. I was eating crabcakes.

For photoshoots.

Teaching the unflexible how to do a pilates move :)

My running buddies. Lucy and Ethel.

We're opposites. Dark and blue. Light and brown.

The Swag and Buckle.

Besties.

Me and my assistant!

On the Mighty Mississippi, thank you very much.

Looking at mountains.