Our adventure begins in four days and we are drowning in all our stuff.  I have tried to pitch things, but it is too late; we just need to get it on the truck.  Well, actually it is a sea container that my husband owns and a truck driver is going to pick it up on Friday.  Not many families own sea containers parked up close to the house, and we own two.  I know several men who would love to own one and drool over my husband’s, but they know their wife would not want it, let alone the home owners association.  At least my husband’s eccentric tastes are working to our advantage.

     The plan is to head out Saturday morning at 2:00 AM with me and my mom driving eight kids in the van and towing a small tractor on a little flatbed.  Yes, we have a couple tractors too.  My husband will lead our little caravan with the truck towing a trailer containing some boxes along with a dog, three rabbits, four goats, 30 chickens, a couple lizards, a tree frog and a snake.  Maybe we can stop along the way and charge a fee for our petting zoo to help pay for the gas.  Because of these extra passengers, we are driving 1,045 miles straight through.  Thinking about what might happen with many animals and children with one of them being a 19 month-old is just too much, so I am taking this minute by minute.  My thoughts gravitate to Elizabeth Elliot’s saying, “Do the next thing.”

     The hardest thing has been saying goodbye to dear, dear friends.  I truly thought I would never move again and I had just become very comfortable with everything.  I liked my doctors, the baristas at Starbucks, my favorite checker at Costco whose line I would always wait in even if the line next to me was open, my pharmacist who knows me by name, our auto mechanic, my fellow homeschooling moms, and my church.  Leaving my church is leaving family—it hurts.  I am not so sure many people understand how difficult it is to leave, it is so hard that I question time and time again if this is the right thing to do.  We live in an age where many Christians treat churches as they do the grocery store; if it doesn't carry their favorite apples anymore, they move on to one that does.  Not Bethel, it is a beautiful picture of the church described in Acts 2 with members knitted together in love.  Of course we all have to look at one another though the grace filled lenses of the Gospel, but that is what everyone does there.  They cling to the Gospel, and it is unashamedly preached there.

      As I remember these things my mind is set upon heavenly things and I know that this is only a short time in our journey through this life.  Our adventure to Missouri, though it seems overwhelming right now, will be so small and short in the light of eternity.  My comfort comes from knowing that goodbye is not for very long at all.  So that is why I say to my dear family at Bethel, not “goodbye”, but “see y’all later.”