Gypsies...

Now that I'm trying this blog thing, I started thinking last night about what I wanted to tell you. I guess this is kind of a an online journal for family, friends, and complete strangers. My first thought was to edit myself a lot, and I will be doing that to some extent. I'm a little worried about how I share things, about how I come across. But this seems like a good way to keep a lot of people updated on our life without writing 50 emails each time something momentous occurs, so I guess I should just dive in. I thought I'd tell you first about the life of a wandering gypsy. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who grew up in Oak Ridge, NC. She lived on a farm with horses, and it was the same farm that her daddy and her granddaddy and her great-granddaddy had lived on before. She had a great appreciation for local ties, family roots, and the family soil. One day, this little girl went off to college. While she was there, she fell in love with an Air Force brat. He didn't have those same ties with local things and family soil, but he had an ability that she didn't have to be able to move as a answer to God's call on his life. She married him, and she's been trying to get this sense of excitement and purpose about moving ever since. =) David and I married in the summer of 2001. I've figured it up recently, and it looks like I will have moved and changed lives 4 times in the 5 years we've been married. Our first move was from North Carolina to Charlottesville, VA for him to finish his last year of law school at UVA. Our second move was from Charlottesville to Washington, DC for him to work as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals, DC Circuit. The third move was to Birmingham, AL to start life here as a lawyer in private practice. And the fourth move will be back to DC for his clerkship on the U.S. Supreme Court starting this summer. It sounds kinda glamorous to me when I write it that way, but anybody who has moved a lot knows that its not. Each time, its packing up life and starting over again from scratch. New home, new church, new jobs, hopefully new friends. I'm a girl who doesn't like change. Boy, am I a traditionalist. I was thinking it over a few months ago, and I realized that if my life had gone the way I'd planned, I'd be living 5 minutes from my parents, and I would've been in that house since I graduated from college. I thought it was such a good idea at the time. There are lots of appealing things about that idea for me still. But I can see God's hand in all the moving and changing that I've had to do. He shoved me out of my comfort zone, and I've learned so much about His care for us. I have learned that He is there, and He will provide in ways that I couldn't have known if I hadn't become a gypsy. I can look back on each place that we've lived and remember ways that we've served God there. I can think back and see blessings that He provided just for us in that particular time and place. I am stronger in Him because of our moves. I have been stretched so that I can serve Him better, and I wouldn't trade that at the end of the day for a house with a white picket fence and some stability.