on 2x4s and community and anticipation

These days one of us makes a daily builder-hovering trip to the house site. Some days it ends with pure excitement, some days with an email to the builder explaining that that cable jack is in the absolutely wrong place. But when I walk our dust-covered floors, turning in circles trying to figure out what furniture will go where and what we'll need to fill in the holes, I don't picture the house photo-ready, but [hopefully] filled with people to share life with.

After almost a year of several unknowns, it's as if we've come to the top of the hill and can begin to see what is ahead. Or at least anticipate it - we've definitely learned that you never know what the Lord has planned. This season has been a beautifully trying one that has strengthened our marriage and taught us a lot about our little plans compared to God's big picture and how He's intricately aware of both. After these months, I'm happy to see its end only because it is replaced with the start of a new community in Lexington, South Carolina. And since we know this new house and community is a blessing of a gift from the Lord, we found it fitting to record those sentiments on our [pre-Sheetrock] walls.

[Got ahead of myself and left out a couple words of this important verse. Full text here.]

[This one appropriately went above the dishwasher.]

I guess you could say that I have high hopes for this first home of ours. That it would be a place where friends will feel comfortable, where stories will be told, where those soul-binding similarities are discovered. I hope it can be a spot for dinner parties and Sunday school get-togethers and DNow weekends and baby showers. I want it to be a place where parents and siblings and [one day] cousins and out-of-town friends will fill all the available sleep spots. Where friends know they can pour themselves a glass of tea without asking. Where people can be recharged over coffee and dessert. Where successes can be celebrated and burdens be carried.

We are thankful for new beginnings [even if we didn't choose them] and for the buds of friendships that we hope and anticipate to bloom into more vibrant ones. Until they discover how weird we are. Mostly kidding.

And I hope that some of that blossoming happens around our supper table.