Tonight I am sad. I feel overwhelmed by all the choices we need to make in the next few weeks. For those who may not know, last week we sold our house. Yay! I know, it's only a tiny yay, but that's more than I was feeling this weekend. I feel like I should be so happy right now that our house has sold and our plans to head overseas can start moving forward. Instead I just feel sad and confused and like we were totally crazy when we decided this was a good idea, this of course referring to our plan to move our family to South Africa, start up a business that we have no experience in, and then support ourselves so we can get involved in some type of missions or community development. Who does that? Oh, yeah...we do that.

Right now everything is up in the air. We don't have a definite date that we are moving out of our house. We should know for sure next week. Once we know that, we can make a plan for some temporary housing, we just don't know how temporary our housing will be. We've talked about moving in April and we've talked about moving in June. We don't know where we'll be living once we sell this house and we don't know where we'll be living once we move to South Africa. It seems like so many things are dependent on other things and there are some decisions we can't make until we get information from other people, so everything just kind of stands still. In the mean time, we may have 3 weeks here or we may have a little more. In that time, we have a house that needs to be packed up, items that need to be sorted through, kids to explain things to, and normal life to live.

Tyson and Jori seem to be doing ok, but I honestly don't know what is going on in their little heads. Jori is fixated on taking one of her baby dolls along. It is an ugly baby, one that I took away several months ago and she never missed. However, I didn't actually throw it away, so it was discovered a couple days ago and now she is totally stuck on having this doll. I don't think she actually wants the doll, but I think it is just something for her to hold on to. So for now I'll give her the doll and then we'll figure it out in 2 months, or 4 months or however many months from now it happens to be when we finally move to South Africa.Because we ARE moving to South Africa. I think I need to say that more for myself than for anyone who might be reading this.

The reality is that at some point in the next 6 months (why not give myself some extra time!) we will be moving to a new country. A place where we (thankfully) have some connections and are somewhat familiar with, but a place that will be very different as a long term home than it was as a short term holiday. We will be far away from family and friends. There will be no 12 hour drives to Edgerton, no 4 hour flights to Washington. We will be thousands of miles away from the people that we hang out with on a weekly basis. We won't be able to stop in at Auntie Rachel's house for a few minutes, which often turns into a half hour or more. We won't have our church, our small group, my women's Bible study-all the things that have helped us with our spiritual footing will be gone. We will be in a totally different time zone. Making phone calls is not going to be quite so quick and easy anymore. We won't have our trusted babysitter Elisabeth right down the road, which means we probably won't be having many date nights.

Right now I am just kind of at a place where all I am seeing is the things we are giving up. The things that we will be losing. I know, deep down I really do know, that once we are on the other side, things will look brighter. I know that our family had such a great experience over the 10 weeks we lived in South Africa. I know that Darin and I grew closer to one another and closer to God as well. It is just really hard for me to push through all the chaos and confusion that I feel surrounded by right now. It is hard to think of the good stuff that's coming when I have so many goodbyes to say and tears to cry on this side of the ocean.