Ten states in eleven days. Campgrounds. Storms. Urgent care. Oppressive heat. A bottle rocket to the face. A flat tire. A missing bolt. A hitch that apparently had no business still hitching. Crutches. And one mobility scooter.
We had gone looking for somewhere to land.
And landed right back where we'd started.
For about a week, that's exactly what it felt like.
Defeat.
There had been no grand revelation. No beautiful southern town where overwhelming peace descended upon us and God announced, Here. This is what I've been trying to show you.
We just came home.
The camper was still carrying evidence of eleven days on the road, and honestly, so were we. We'd spent so much time trying to figure out what came next that eventually Nick's mom suggested something neither of us had apparently considered.
Stop.
Go rest.
She suggested taking the camper up to Aunt Amy and Uncle Dusty's place in Hart for a few days. They had a beautiful piece of property where we could camp, fish, let the kids play, and recover from whatever in the world we'd just put ourselves through.
Honestly, rest sounded pretty good.
Aunt Amy wasn't actually Nick's aunt. She and his mom had been best friends since elementary school, making her one of those people who becomes family without requiring blood or marriage to make it official.
Nick knew and trusted her.
I didn't.
In fact, I didn't really know either Aunt Amy or Uncle Dusty. So after traveling around the country with my little family, there was something strangely vulnerable about parking our temporary home on the property of two people who were essentially strangers to me.
But this wasn't another destination.
We weren't scouting Hart.
We weren't researching jobs.
We weren't asking whether we could live there.
We were tired.
So we went north to rest.
And that made all the difference.
Aunt Amy and Uncle Dusty's place had a rhythm of its own. Life slowed down there. You sat on the porch. You smoked cigarettes. Maybe you had a few drinks.
Sanctification has a timeline too.
Don't judge me.
They welcomed us into their little slice of heaven and spent the next few days simply showing us around. They drove us through Oceana County and introduced us to some of their favorite places. We went fishing. They took us to the Stony Lake Channel, a beautiful little spot that would eventually become one of our family's favorite places to go to the beach.
There were also pieces of their lifestyle that appealed to something I'd already been longing for. I'd become increasingly interested in homesteading and learning how to do more for ourselves, and I wondered whether maybe Aunt Amy could teach me some of those things.
But for once, I wasn't trying to make any of it mean something.
Nobody needed me to find our next campground. Nobody needed to outrun a storm. Nobody needed a tire, a caliper bolt, a hitch, an urgent care, crutches or—thank God—a portable air conditioner.
We could just be.
And I needed that more than I realized.
Then one evening, we were doing what you apparently do at Aunt Amy's.
Sitting on the porch.
A neighbor wandered over to hang out for a while. There wasn't anything particularly remarkable about it. He and Nick started talking, and eventually we began telling him our story—where we'd just been, why we'd taken this ridiculous trip in the first place, and how we had somehow returned home with even less certainty about what came next.
Nick needed work.
We needed direction.
And the neighbor basically said:
"Well, I can get you a job if you need a job. We even provide housing for people."
Excuse me?
We had just spent eleven days driving through ten states trying to figure out where we were supposed to go.
We'd searched.
Planned.
Prayed.
Mapped.
Reserved.
Redirected.
And now I was sitting on a porch in the part of Michigan I hadn't even been trying to move to while some neighbor casually told my husband he could help him get a job—and that housing might come with it.
We didn't find this opportunity.
It found us.
Aunt Amy encouraged us too. If Nick wanted to pursue the opportunity, there was no reason we needed to immediately haul the camper back home. We could leave it right there. Nick could use it while he got established, and I could work on everything that would need to happen back home if we actually decided to do this.
It sounded crazy.
Then again, so did most of what we'd just done.
After our few days of resting at Aunt Amy and Uncle Dusty's, we headed home together. We hadn't made some impulsive decision on the porch and immediately started dismantling our lives.
This was bigger than that.
We had spent enough of this journey trying to understand God's direction for ourselves. Before uprooting our family, we wanted godly counsel.
So during that next week, we went to people we trusted spiritually—two pastors from our congregation and a spiritual mentor. We told them what had happened. We shared the unexpected opportunity in Hart and what we were considering doing, and we asked them to pray about it with us.
None of them came back with a reason they believed we shouldn't go.
That didn't make the decision easy.
Some of our family didn't want us to leave, particularly because moving meant putting more distance between them and the kids. I could understand that. Our decision affected people who loved us too.
But ultimately, we had to decide what counsel we were going to follow.
We had sought out people we trusted to pray with us and help us discern whether there was a reason to stop.
There wasn't.
So we decided to take the next step.
Not because we knew exactly how everything was going to work.
We didn't.
We still had a house.
I still had a career.
Our children had a life in Kalamazoo.
We had things to pack, decisions to make and a future that looked considerably less organized than I would have preferred.
But Nick had an opportunity to work.
Aunt Amy and Uncle Dusty had given us somewhere to begin.
And for the first time since we'd left home searching for direction, something seemed to be falling into place without us forcing it there.
So we went back north.
This time, it wasn't another stop on an eleven-day adventure.
This time, we were taking a step.
There were still a thousand questions waiting for us on the other side of that decision.
But there was one tiny detail none of us recognized as significant at the time.
We had hauled that camper through ten states in eleven days trying to find somewhere to land.
We brought it to Aunt Amy and Uncle Dusty's because we were tired.
We parked it there because we needed somewhere to rest.
And after everything we'd done trying to find our destination...
the camper stayed.
We thought we were only stopping to rest.
We didn't know we were actually arriving.
Sometimes the place we're meant to find appears only after we stop trying so hard to find it.