One: bff (and bridesmaid!) visiting me from Pennsylvania.
Two: long drives in scary winter weather, mercifully protected by God.
Three: dates with my beloved last weekend (one of them a fancy dress-up banquet in a soft nighttime snowfall).
Seven: East Coast friends and family visiting next weekend.
Ten: days till I marry my best friend.
Eighteen: inches of snow.
Countless: graces and mercies of God.
It wasn’t supposed to snow.
It was supposed to be like November and December—winter months pretending to be spring, with forty-degree-sunshine days and muddy fields and the smell of soggy grass. It was a little odd to have a summery Christmas, but I was too busy to complain, and I just assumed the warm trend would continue till May.
But not so. February wants to be the last week of December. There’s a blizzard in the gorge, twenty-car collisions on the I-5 corridor. Schools are closing in the middle of the day, sending kids back home to white-painted houses hunkered against single-digit cold. Winter slept late, but it’s waking now.
And I thought Christmas break would be my only hope for seeing snow this year!
I was sort of scared to go home for Christmas. Somehow I had gotten so used to being in Florida that even though I knew I missed home, I was afraid that maybe my memories were faulty…maybe it wasn’t as good as I remembered. I was afraid to have my wistful recollections proven wrong.
But I was also looking forward to it because I wanted to find out. I wanted to know if my perspectives would be different, or if things about home would seem changed. I wanted to see if I’d miss Florida and if I’d be oh-so-ready to come back.
Well, now it’s behind me, and I have found out.
The first couple of days were weird. Certain details about my house seemed slightly different. The front door seemed exaggeratedly further left than my memory had told me, and the hardwood floor looked a lot brighter and bolder. My bedroom, which I share with two sisters instead of just one roommate, seemed unbelievably small. All the mountains and hills and evergreen trees—not to mention my seven-year-old sister—seemed so much taller.
One thing that didn’t shock me at all, however, was the weather. I slipped back into the twenty- and thirty-something temperatures with no trouble whatsoever. In fact, I thrived in it—and oh my, it was blissful to drink copious quantities of fresh, ice-cold mountain water!
I think the most exciting thing about my trip was that it truly did not disappoint. To be with my family and with Sam again was everything I needed. To lope my horse over the snowy backroads in the mornings made me feel like royalty. To eat my mom’s delicious food and play games of Catan with my brothers and go out to fancy restaurants with Sam… to feel the snow falling softly on my face, to feed the chickadees out of the palm of my hand till my fingers froze, to drive down our road at night and see the Christmas lights on our dormer windows… gosh it was wonderful.
Of course, the problem with having such a beautiful vacation was that I had to say goodbye. It was hard. Very, very, very hard. Coming back to eighty degrees and flat landscape and stale water when I could have so many of my closest friends, all my beautiful mountains, all my beloved animals, and all the winter wonderland of Washington wasn’t what I necessarily would have chosen for myself.
But home lacks one very important thing that made my return more than worth it: the opportunity to spend hours and hours of my week deep in the Word of God, and to be taught and discipled by some of the most knowledgeable and loving people that I know. That is what I sorely missed while I was at home. I saw so much less of my Bible, both in church and out of it, and I got terribly hungry for it. So I will press onward and finish strong… homesick as I may be. :)
It’s been nothing but cold and gray here since our Christmas snow—typical of January in Goldendale. Only once or twice has the temperature even climbed above freezing—and the above pictures are from one of our few sightings of blue sky. The weather coupled with the dreaded end of Christmas break has created a bit of a cloud over things, as I mentally prepare to say lots of goodbyes, spend a day in airports and airplanes, turn nineteen, and pour myself back into school and work away from my family. It’s all déjà vu of mid-August, right before I started my year at GCBI—the weird sense of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, wanting to stop the passage of time and enjoy being at home but also wanting time to move faster so I can actually get started again on my purpose for this school year. It’ll be better once I get back into the swing of things, but in the meantime, the path looks rather long and steep!
I have to leave this beautiful place and go back to Florida, back to school and work—back to what I committed to over a year ago—in only a week. I can’t believe my vacation has passed so fast. I can’t believe my year at Bible school is halfway over. Time flies.
It’s going to be hard to leave home again. But I’m excited to return to the place that I know God wants me to be—excited to see the remainder of my wide-margin Bible fill up with notes, my mind fill up with knowledge, and my heart fill up with the transforming power of God’s goodness!
