I’m writing this as my 4 year old plays pretend in the room just beyond my door, I love listening to his little imagination come to life. And I say that because he could just as soon stumble into this room to ask me one of his many questions so please be kind with my spelling and grammar errors! LOL! I wanted to get this blog post out because I feel like so many of you have become my friends; Your investment in our endeavors, your support, and your understanding mean the world to us!

I was recently voice messaging back and forth with a dear friend of mine about what’s going on in our life and she said, “Tessa, I’m excited for you to share this with everyone online because THIS is life! Often life isn’t shiny and we need to hear more about these “unhighlighted” moments.” I paused on that thought because I have been struggling so much with HOW I’m going to share all of this. It still doesn’t all make sense in my mind and I think I’m trying to find ways in which I can “put a coat of paint” on it to make it look or sound better when in reality…there isn’t a type of paint out there that could dress up this reality.

I’ll start by saying, I still don’t have all the answers and we are still very much processing through this massive change in our plans. So I’ll probably have another post in the future that speaks a bit more to all of that or maybe we’ll talk about it on a IG live. The short end of it is this….we are no longer moving to Michigan. I’m sure most of you are thinking…

didn’t they just announce they were moving? And didn’t they just put their house on the market? And didn’t Guy already start his new job??(btw…yes, yes, and yes!)

Let me try and explain where everything started to unravel for us. From the very beginning of all of this, Guy and I agreed that we wanted: 1.) to be closer to my side of the family, 2.) to have more time freedom with work and have a bit more long-term security, 3.) for me to be able to stay home with the kids for the next year while we settled in, and 4.) to find a home that fit our needs as a family of 6 that we didn’t have to do a ton of work on. Right away we started to see a few red flags within both the job and the housing market.

It comes as no shock that working within the corporate world is very, VERY different than owning and operating your own business your whole life! And right off the bat there was a bit of a shock to Guy’s central nervous system that this wasn’t going to be at all what he had envisioned, plus time away from home and family was going to be pretty significant within his new role. As well as, a lofty pay cut!

As we started scouring the market for a house we soon found ourselves in another kind of shock…we hadn’t bought a house (for ourselves) in 6 years and although we’ve bought, flipped and sold multiple properties over the years; it’s a very different kind of reality when you’re trying to envision your family in a space. Over and over again we were coming up against inflated home values that didn’t even meet our basic needs, not to mention, they often all needed to be renovated (which we didn’t want to do in this first year of starting a new job). On top of that, we couldn’t find a decent priced home in the area that we were really wanting to be in.

Coupled with all of that, came all the financial stress that we were facing. Having taken this job we faced a 50% pay cut and on top of an inflated housing market we knew we were going to be living each and every day, pay check to pay check, with little to no money for anything extra. The thought of it all had us spinning. We wanted so badly to make all of this work but in our haste, we had failed to do our research; both in the financial breakdown of all this and within the market we are dealing with right now.

I share all of this not to over expose our family but to share in the raw and real truth that I think many of us face. There are dreams in all of our hearts and sometimes we look past the road blocks ahead when all we see is the green light in front of us. This has all been such a hard pill to swallow, not to mention, an extrordinary learning curve but once we allowed ourselves to see realistically what lay ahead of us, we knew we couldn’t compromise all those things that we had wanted.

It has felt like we have lived our lives in fast-forward and reverse these last 3 weeks. And right now as we process and reassess what comes next after all of this we are just trying to be grateful for each other, our family, and God’s abundant provision. We know that no matter what happens or when, that it’s all in His timing and we can’t try and do it on our own.

Thank you to all of you that have looked after us these last few weeks, I can’t even begin to express my deep and profound gratitude for the outpouring of love and support we have received. We are truly so blessed by our community both locally and online!

“So don’t lose your bold courageous faith, for you are destined for a great reward! You need the strength of endurance to reveal the poetry of God’s will and then you receive the promise in full.” -Hebrews 10: 35-36