A few years ago, I drove home from work thinking, “This is it. This is what I’m going to spend the rest of my life doing. Driving to and from a mall to work in a little store with people half my age.” Despite the fact that I had a decent amount of education and remembered feeling some passion and drive in my life, at forty years old I felt stuck in a low-paying, low-respect customer service job. Not long after that, my entire world changed. My husband lost his job and found another one almost half a continent away, and we picked up and moved west to the prairie. When the chaos of the job loss hit, we feared everything. How would our kids react to moving? Would they have friends in the new place? Would we like the new town and our new jobs?

Then we moved, and everything changed. When it changed, it changed for the better. Now I work in the same college that my husband does, and while I’m only working in an office, I still feel like I’m contributing to training the next generation. Not only did my work change, but somehow in the process of picking up and moving, my family and I changed. My kids grew up. My husband became a more constant presence in my day to day existence. We acquired a lot of pets. We eliminated a lot of debt. We began to learn to slow down and enjoy each other.

I decided to stop holding onto quite a few things I held dear before, a lot of stuff from the past that weighed me down, and start looking at what was good in life. And you know what I found? I found that there’s a lot of good stuff going on.

We now can say we have lived in Nebraska for an entire year. During that year, we weathered a cold Nebraska winter. We traveled along the path that many settlers traveled going west and visited quite a few historical sites along the way. We learned a new town, found our way around, and put down some roots. This blog is about the things that changed, the things we experienced and keep experiencing. I’ve learned a lot in the last year, and maybe the thing that stands out the most to me is how sometimes in life the things that look bad are, in the end, good. Very, very good!

I found this in the snow in our back yard last winter. My daughter wrote it. She’s right. Thanks, God!