Well, we did it! (Or I should say, God did it). We have officially sold our house. We are leaving one place and stepping out into the unknown.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the sale-it’s the one place our daughter Adeline has known. It feels safe, familiar. I love the hardwood floors and the woodwork so characteristic of a 1913 Craftsman farm house. Someone walked in once and commented on how “solid” the place felt. Our 94 year old neighbor, Don, remembers running over to play with the children who lived here when it was first built. So much history has unfolded here—of which our own past 6 years are a mere part, including 2 jobs for Adam, my first teaching job, the birth of Adeline.

However safe it may seem, though, I know that God is calling me to a different place, which means letting go. I think I can let go of the house easily enough. I’ll miss the quirky bright blue tile countertops in the kitchen, and the beautiful corner windows in Adeline’s room boasting the original window pane pattern and bursting with sunlight. I’ll miss the porch most of all-it’s broad arch featuring the swaying branches of a near hundred-year-old Asian maple tree.

I think what I’ll miss the most, though, is the woods and the pond, and the fireflies which danced high and low, peppering the dusk landscape from June through August. I’ll miss the orange maple trees reflected below cattails in the pond in the Fall, picking the black raspberries that lined the path in Summer, the flowering trees and phlox and violets that burst into beauty in early Spring, their white pedals scattered along the trail.

So yes, there is a sense of real loss, but I am looking forward to what is going to be gained as a result of all this. In my twenties, I wanted (and still want) my life to be a story of His Grace. I also want my life to display His Glory, and am reminded that “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). It seems to be a pattern that, in laying seemingly small things at His feet, we are given immeasurably more than we need. Maybe it isn’t actually about losing at all, but about gaining: as Grandma Effie so wonderfully expressed, “There is nothing I have given to God that I do not still possess.”

So, I’ll do what the Centurion did, who “took him at His Word and left” (John 4:50).