A Personal Life Update
Last weekend, my sweet Grandma passed away.
I thought about writing about something completely unrelated for my newsletter this week, but it just did not feel right. I started this newsletter to be a fun creative outlet, but I also want it to be a reflection of my life and the things on my mind.
When my husband and I started making plans to travel for the funeral, I had to figure out what clothes to wear for the service. And that was when I realized that I had never actually been to a funeral before. I had been to visitations before for people we knew distantly but never to a service for a family member.
I feel so blessed that I did not have to experience that until I was 23. Yet I also feel like the unfamiliarity made me fear it so much more. And that is true of most things in life. The less acquainted we are with something, the more afraid we tend to be.
During the service, the pastor talked a lot about the JOY that we have even in the face of death because of Jesus. Because the death of someone I love was something I had never truly faced personally, I was not really sure how I would handle it. But I found that even in sorrow and even on hard days, Jesus offers joy, hope, and peace. Saying that death is defeated now seems to hold even more meaning to me.
The pastor also talked a lot about how much Grandma loved her family and how much she loved when we were all together. She worked to keep her family close, even when some of us lived hundreds of miles away. For decades, she and my grandfather lived right next door to my great aunt and uncle. Siblings and in-laws across the yard, and they would tell you they never had a problem. They were so close. He talked about the importance of family and what a gift it would be to live life right next door to your own family.
You know that feeling when you are in a room, like for church or another group event, and someone is at the front addressing the crowd, but you feel like they are speaking directly to you? As the pastor spoke of living close to family, I really felt like he was talking to me.
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Recently, my husband and I have been talking a lot about where we want to live. I feel like it started because we had so many places we dreamed of living and wanted to move around and experience lots of places - the beach, out west, a big city. But slowly, it has changed into a desire to live near family and put down deep roots. We want a community. A place that feels like home.
Jackson grew up in a small town. Between all his family there and the friendships he cultivated, he built a deep community. He has friends now that he has been close to since he was 6. (They are the kind of relationships Ben Rector talks about, when he says, you can’t make old friends.) They are something that cannot be replicated when you move to a new place.
I didn’t grow up in a small town, but I attended a very small school from K-12th grade. I always say that was my “small town”. Many of the kids in my graduating class, I also went to Kindergarten with. There were 49 of us on graduation night. We were truly like a family, and we grew up together.
Through those experiences, we have both experienced the joy of a community where we were known and involved - whether we always wanted to be or not. And that is what we desire now.
Still the Question Remains: Where Do We Want to Live?
It is such a fun and yet heavy thing to consider. On our drive home, Jackson and I were comparing the decision of where to live to the decision of where to go to college. When you are 18 making a decision about college, while you know it is a BIG decision in your life, I don’t know that we completely grasp how much that decision shapes the rest of our lives - where we live, where we work, who we marry, who our friends are, what we believe, etc. But now, we can very clearly see impact of deciding where to call home.
I recently read the book The Midnight Library, and in the book, the main character gets to experience all of these parallel lives to the one she actually lived. A life that could have been hers if she had made one decision differently in her life - a life where she is a rockstar and a life where she is a mom. While I do not not think where Jackson and I move will impact whether or not we become rockstars, I do recognize that when we choose to live in one place, we will have a completely different life than if we chose to live to another.
Final Thoughts…
After the service, we made the 6 hour drive back home. Unlike our drive the day before, this time my brother and my sister-in-law followed close behind us. They were coming back to spend the weekend in our city. Because of the timing of everything, they spent the night with at our apartment, and we got to spend even more time together than we had originally planned. I think Grandma would have liked that she orchestrated our sibling sleepover.
We have not made a decision quite yet about where we want to live, and we recognize that even when we do, it might not end up being where we stay forever. What we have decided is that we want to be close to our family. Whether that is in Tennessee or Indiana or somewhere else we don’t even know about yet. And I pray no matter where we live we continue to cultivate the love in our family that Grandma gave to us.
Thanks for reading. Next week, I am planning to send out a list of all the things I have been loving in July - podcasts, products, meals, music, etc. I am hoping to make this a monthly newsletter that will always go out at the end of the month! Subscribe so you do not miss it!
Talk to you next Monday.
Take care,
Caroline