Well, friends, it’s spring time, which means that it’s time for our family to pick up and move. It seems like every year during this season we seem to move…and, quite frankly, it seems that way because it’s true! Not to brag or anything, but this will be our 11th move in 11 years. I’m pretty sure I should earn a badge or something for this level of expertise. Or at least a pedicure when this is all over.

Now, the question you’re all wondering: WHERE IN THE WORLD WILL YOU BE MOVING TO THIS TIME?!

Drumroll, please…

Answer: Washington state!

What the what?! You’re coming back to Washington?! Yes, yes it’s true. We’re going back to where it all began, good ‘ol Washington. And SOON. Actually, we’re moving THIS WEEK (Saturday to be exact). WHAAAAAAAT?!?! I know. What can I say, we do crazy well around here.

So, that’s the short answer. The long answer, however, is a bit…well…longer. Taking the advice of my pal Maria in The Sound of Music: “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start…”

Jon and I both grew up in western Washington, just south of Seattle. Our childhood homes were only a few miles apart, but we didn’t meet each other until we were in undergrad at Western Washington University in Bellingham. We met and fell in love in Washington (read the whole story here, but bring your Kleenex cuz it’s a real tear-jerker). We started our family in Washington: David and Jacob were both born in Seattle and, although they don’t remember any of it because they were so itty-bitty, we became a family there.

We’ve moved several times over the years–some moves have been small (a mile across town), some have been big (Ireland). Through it all, though, Washington has always been our home base. For the past 3 years we’ve been living in the San Francisco Bay Area which, interestingly enough,  is the longest period of time that Jon and I have remained in one geographic region since we’ve been married.

California has been so, so good to us. We love our community, our friends, our church, our kids’ schools, Jon’s job, his co-workers, THE SUNSHINE. And we will miss all of those. Dearly. So why, then, would we abandon it all? Why would we leave the people, the places and THE SUNSHINE that we love?

Quite simply, we will be leaving because that’s God’s plan for us. I recently heard a quote that summarized my perspective on this pretty perfectly:

“Go where you are sent, stay where you are put, and you give what you’ve got until you are done.” –Jill Briscoe (If you haven’t heard or read Jill Briscoe’s work, stop what you’re doing right now and go look her up. She’s chock full of gems like that). This quote sums up so well why we are moving right now–and why we have always moved, and likely will continue to move–throughout our lives.  Go where you are sent, stay where you are put, and give what you’ve got until you are done.

We went where we were sent, we have stayed where we were put, we’ve given what we’ve got, and now we are done (at least right here, right now). God is sending us somewhere new, so “Go” is our next step in the cycle. That being said, as our kids enter their school years we also want to set down roots. Somewhere.

For about a year now we have been intentionally looking for a more permanent house–we currently rent, and we’re kind of over it. We are at the point in our lives where we want the permanence of ownership, not the transitory nature of renting. We want to unpack all of the picture boxes and hang everything up on the walls. We want to get away from the mentality of “I’m not going to buy that because I don’t want to have to move it in a few months or a year.” I want to set up a nursery for my baby before she’s no longer a baby.

Last summer we started praying for direction about what this feeling of needing some permanence would look like for us. Our prayer was that God would open doors where He wanted us, and close them where He did not want us. That, and that we would have the wisdom to listen to Him when He opened and closed those doors. And patience. Lots of patience.

Last summer we began searching for a house here in Silicon Valley and it was…interesting. We’d spend our weekends going to open houses for million dollar homes that were built in the 1950’s (“mid-century architecture”) and falling apart (“charming”) and tiny (“cozy”). And we tried to find one that we liked–we even got a very nice local real estate agent to help us–but in the end, we couldn’t stomach giving all of our money, blood, sweat, tears, and sanity to a million dollar piece of junk, even if it was a charmingly cozy piece of mid-century architecture.

So we went back to praying. And waiting. And right about when my patience for waiting was wearing out (approximately 5 minutes later) we were presented with an incredible opportunity. The opportunity was born out of a tragedy, but it was an opportunity nonetheless. Some dear friends of ours from Washington had a family member pass away, and they needed to sell her house. Her house happened to be about 10 minutes down the road from us.

We spent a couple of months working with our friends to see if the logistics would pan out for us to move forward with the purchase. I started dreaming about what life would be like in that house once I unpacked the pictures and hung them on the walls and painted my baby’s nursery. I was certain that this was God’s answer to our prayer.

In the end, however, we couldn’t find a way to make it work. It was no fault of anyone’s, it just didn’t work out. I was heartbroken at first, but then I remembered our prayer: Open doors where You want us, and CLOSE DOORS where you do not.

Ugggh. Why do you always have to answer our prayers, God?

So, that door was closed. We went back to praying. And waiting.

And, again, when my waiting-patience was starting to wear out, God presented another opportunity. Another door to knock on, if you will.

Throughout this whole process we had never once considered the possibility of leaving the Bay Area. Yet the next door that God presented was exactly that: leaving. One day Jon was casually looking at some job stuff (he likes to keep up to date on what’s happening in his industry…kind of like how I keep track of when new Starbucks locations are opening up near parks and library play groups for purposes of my own career advancement.) He noticed that there was an incredible job that quite literally described him and his skill set (a skill set, by the way, that is quite unusual and even more unique). As we has reading the job description he kept muttering under his breath, “This is me…this is me!”

So we decided to see if it was him, if this job was the right fit. That night Jon applied for the job, a few days later he did a phone interview, and the following week he flew up to Seattle for the in-person interview. By Friday of that week he had the job. The whole process was insanely fast and smooth and perfect. When God opens a door, he opens it WIDE.

There was no question that this was the open door we’d been waiting for, so here we are. Jon’s new job will be working with a company called Oculus in Redmond, Washington. (Side note: The change of companies is why we couldn’t tell anyone we were moving until today. Apple, if you haven’t noticed, is super-secretive and they don’t exactly want their employees sticking around after they give their leave notices…so we had to wait until now to spill the beans).

Jon’s new job will be leading an engineering team working on cutting-edge virtual reality research. Cool, huh? Oculus is a smaller company, but it is a subsidiary of Facebook–this means he gets to work in a startup-type environment with the backing of one of the largest tech companies in the world. Kind of a “best of both worlds” scenario.

And the part I’m most excited about is that this job should give Jon a more sane work-life balance.  As incredible as Apple is, that level of expectation and perfection comes at a price. Jon loves his work, but it comes with a lot of long nights, after-hours conference calls, and business trips to the other side of the globe. This new job is in research–not getting hot new products to an insatiable market–so the timeline should be more manageable and his schedule should be more normal. We are hoping that this shift will allow Jon more time at home during our kids’ waking hours…and hopefully a bit of a reduction in the ‘ol stress department.

Then, on top of all this, we get to be home.

No matter where we go in this great big world, Washington has always felt like home to us. All of our family lives in Washington–our Grammy and Grandpa and Nana and Papa and Aunties and Uncles and dear friends who are like family are there.  We are so excited to once again be physically close to the ones we have held close in our hearts all of these years away.

And, as excited as we are to be moving home and on to the next adventure in this crazy life, there is also some mourning. We have invested ourselves here in California, we have made incredible friends, we have truly enjoyed our work and the little life that we’ve carved out for our family here. We have “given what we’ve got”, and that makes leaving incredibly difficult. I think that means we’ve done it right, though. If we’ve truly given of ourselves, then it should hurt to leave that part of us behind. It’s a painful goodbye, but we are better for it.

So, in a not so little nutshell, there is the “why” to the question of what the heck we’re doing. There’s another whole amazing part to this story about where we will be living once we arrive in Washington, but that’s going to warrant a separate blog post. For now, we are facing the bittersweet reality that we will be trading one home for another, one life for a new one.

Today we choose to walk courageously through this open door, following the One who opened it for us. Catch you on the other side, friends!