Long Overdue – We are in Michigan!

We came home to Michigan in mid-November and life so easily got away from us. This post is long overdue. In fact, we have had a gazillion people asking us where we are at and what the plan is. 🙂 Well, maybe not a gazillion, but no less than 8. 🙂 So here it is – the condensed version.

We left Arizona in Mid November and had a beautiful drive home. It took us about 5 days of driving. On the way, we visited family and friends but still made great time. We were going to spend the holidays of 2021 in Michigan, and leave again on January 1, 2022. However, our plans got canceled. Twice! And nothing from our doing. We spent so much time in prayer, and our hearts were really feeling like the Lord was going to have us stay in Michigan for a while. But where?

Something that we learned while we were away, was how much we love being close to people. And a community. We love being close to town and having neighbors. We really enjoy being able to run to the grocery store on a quick whim and be back in 20 minutes. That is something we definitely lacked at our home in Gaylord. If we came to Michigan to stay, we wanted to be able to be around people, close to town, in a community, and spend time in the gym.

All of the above, coupled with the fact that we had renters who had already booked our home, created quite an issue of where we were going to live. We contemplated staying with parents, or even canceling our renters, but nothing seemed quite right. That is until we saw a new house for sale!

We ended up purchasing a cute little place in Gaylord, just outside of the city limits, but 2 minutes from everything. It’s adorable and in a nice subdivision. It’s smaller than our house on Passenheim, which we entirely love. Minimizing square footage definitely minimizes cleaning time. We especially love this house as it reminds us of our home in Fairview that we still missed. We aren’t ready to sell our house on Passenheim yet though. Instead, we decided to keep the house and continue renting it for now. We really enjoy being airbnb hosts and hope to continue that for quite some time.

While we have been falling back into a routine, we’ve been keeping pretty busy. Homeschooling is going great. Elijah and Joy are both reading like crazy. Miranda ended up getting a job at the powerhouse gym close by and is working as a personal trainer. She loves it and is learning a lot. Aaron spends each day at the gym these days too. He has met some great people there and gets to share life with those guys. It’s a great opportunity to love on people for sure. Claire has been flying through school and is growing so big.
Sadie has made quite a few friends since we’ve been back and has learned how to snowboard. She loves it!

So what now?

The tentative plan is to stay right here! We have grandiose plans to get a place in Florida to spend our winters. Renting in the very least. We already have 2023 winter reserved in Fort Walton beach. We really wanted to be in Navarre but weren’t able to find something in our budget there. We love the church family there and we will still be close enough to go there a couple of days per week while we are in Florida.

While we are here in Gaylord, we are working on remodeling our new house and hope to have it done this year so we can rent it out when we go to Florida next winter.
We really really want to travel out west too. Possibly the summer of 2023, but we don’t have anything reserved yet.

As for Ministry moving forward, we are immersing ourselves in the gym, our neighborhood, and building relationships around us. We learned so much while on our trip and how we can make each day count for Jesus.
We love.love.love. beach and pool ministry so our trips to Florida will be totally necessary. We are back in church and loving each second of being there with our church family. Gosh, we missed GFF so much.

I realize this is a whirlwind of a post, but I have been putting off the update for too long. 🙂 I hope it finds you well. You’re loved!