Tonight is my last night here in Dallas without my husband. Hooray for that.

Sometime tomorrow HE will arrive home with a truck full of stuff. Not much stuff – once again - as we have downsized considerably over the last few years and leaving all the appliances at the house in KC. Still a full truck of stuff. I have lots of stuff in boxes. I’ve gotten very mama-bearish about my stuff because I’ve gotten rid of so many things in 34 years of moving every few years. I’ve gotten rid of things that I later grieved over. Like books – once we got rid of lots of books and I never got over that. Books are precious. You should never get rid of good books.

It’s just stuff you say? No - it’s the stuff of my earthly life. And we are living an earthly life until the heavenly happens. There's history in the stuff. What I would give right now to have some of the things from the early years of this family. I would have loved to have had a place to keep the piano that my grandmother bought the year I was born and gave to me when I was in grade school. I took it with me from place to place for a while. Poor Larry – I used to say that I knew he loved me by the way he moved that piano. But moving took its toll on it and now it’s gone and the sheet music from my mother’s day and well…like I said there are just some things I wish I had kept. I never had any real talent anyway. Larry built a few pieces of furniture back in the 80s that I have so often wished I had kept. That’s unlikely to happen again. Had I been able to look into the future to see this hour of our life I would have packed more boxes and kept the stuff no matter what. But sometimes you just have to let things go and maybe it’s just part of the package of my life and I don’t seriously grieve over things (like I did a few times in the past) because God gives me perspective but still…sometimes I think of these things and just have to deal with it again because these things really speak to the larger picture of the life I have lived and to me --- they matter.

But I’ve kept the best thing and that would be Larry. My love and my best friend. I loved him in the beginning and while over the years I have felt pretty much every emotion there is that one human being can feel toward another the love is what wins out every time. So I look forward to the moment he drives up tomorrow in that truck full of the stuff of our life. The stuff we will use to begin our life here. The life we are going into is not like the life we are coming out of. We are here to settle. Settle down. Stop. We’re not there yet. I’m thinking we’re going to stand on the edge of this bridge together for a few months more, surveying the garden of our personal life and the land we are to inhabit after we step off the bridge. There is an odd thing that happens when people are in transition. You find yourself in a place of not being what you were but also – not yet what you are going to be. There is a tendency to fill the void that is created in that place and you look to what you know. For me that is very often going to the past. My mind looks toward the past and grasps some “what ifs” and “I wishes”. But there is a future to walk into and Larry and I will do it together. We have some new perspectives and we will take with us all the good stuff that a difficult journey has given us. I look forward to seeing what Father has in mind for Larry to do now. He was pretty specific that He had something in mind. I look forward to looking for a home together and then making it an expression of us. I look forward to becoming part of the community of friends and family that we have already had here for years. I look forward to family reunions with the KC peeps. I look forward to seeing what our new found stability will do for our family. I look forward to seeing what 10 years from now looks like.

As Kim Clement said once in his sing song prophecying "You're somewhere, in the future, and you look much better than you do right now."