Finally, A New Season!!!!!

Praise the Lord, we finally sold our house! Granted it was while Cliff was gone for 3 weeks (who would have thought!), and only after a year on the market. Never the less, thank thank thank you Jesus! We have been praying for this for a year! Looking back, we can't believe it took a year to sell but all in the Lords timing! It is a gorgeous house & we will greatly miss it. Jerry builds some amazing houses! Many, many things have happened in the almost year & a half we have been here. Aaron learned how to walk here; Emily started her first day of pre-school here, and 2 wonderful Christmases. Many wonderful nights with our dear friends watching Idol & Lost while making "gourmet" dinners (not to mention finding out Jason is allergic to cilantro)! And, many a tear shed in our living room & pretty much every other room in the house. Sweet, sweet memories. This has been a hard year though & we are grateful to be moving. The Lord has taught us so much, how to make it on our own, when we were used to being surrounded by friends, being very very smart with our money, trusting the Lord to provide when we had absolutely nothing left, knowing that God really does cause all things to work together for good, and just resting in the Lord with an uncertain future. The Lord has been so gracious to us though, over the past few months he has opened up many doors & we are finally out of our time of uncertainty. He has beyond all measures given us the desire of our hearts!

Back to the house, we did not have an offer for a whole year then within 10 days we had 2 very good offers! So, we accepted one of the offers & are actually closing on April 15th. Cliff was gone to McAllen for 3 weeks helping run a Chick-fil-a that had lost its owner and all of this happened while he was gone. All 3 of us are so thankful he is back! It was not fun having him away, he does so much not to mention keeps me sane. While he was gone, I was looking like a mad woman all over the internet for house to rent in Austin & I had narrowed it down to about 10. Then when Cliff got home, we went & looked at all of them & found the perfect one. It is in Round Rock but closer to the Cedar Park side very close to our church and some great friends. We are moving in on Monday and are so excited!!!

I have been packing pretty much non-stop & ran across a box full of camp stuff. There were pictures, notes, bible studies, memos and it was so bittersweet to look through all the stuff. There were pictures of the kids with the counselors, at the pool, at camp out, on the back porch of the chow hall. There was a picture Kate drew of Emily where Emily was holding something in her hand that was smoking & it was not a match! I even found some old pictures of Chad Gerlt & Cliff when they were counselors together from 10 years ago! Not to mention tons of pictures of Paddlock at random places thanks to Shawn (even one with a dead bird)! Sarah, I found pictures of your 1st year at camp & that summer that Ryan bleached his hair, and of course, tons of pictures of Meghan & Aaron (back in his really chubby days!) There were pictures of Brittany from when she was a camper & a counselor. I also found one when Mindy had really, really long hair and of Jamie when she did masters and many a picture of dog meetings. I cried a lot going through that box. Even after a year, its still hard, I'm guessing it will never be easy though. Camp was such an amazing place & I'm so thankful the Lord had us there for so long. I can look at things and be thankful that all our best friends are from camp or in some way connected with camp! And at anytime if we need people to be praying we could send out 1 e-mail & a hundred people would be praying for us! But anyways, I guess our season is actually just now ending. Even though we left camp a year ago, we still lived out here. We still had counselors over at our house last summer, during reunion, & talked often with full time staff. So in a small way, we were still connected. But now, the Lord has moved us on. I'm really speechless as to what say except that the Lord has been so faithful!

Here are a few pictures of our old house in Kingsland (the first 2) & the new one in Round Rock(the 3rd picture). Can’t wait for people to come visit us in Austin now!! (or I guess it would be Round Rock)