Core Truths

It was nearly three years ago on the Blue Ridge Parkway that we absolutely fell in love with this place! And each time we visited since, we were more and more convinced we would someday call western North Carolina home. Never in a million years did we think it would happen quite so soon and certainly not in the manner it played out. The last time we drove the Parkway was in late October. We were here to see fall foliage for the first time ever. Little did we know that we would lay eyes on a 115-year-old house during that trip which we would call home barely two months later. Our life has taken a dramatic turn since that October trip, and our family couldn’t be any happier with how our story is unfolding. The Blue Ridge Parkway closes every winter season due to snow, ice, and winds at the higher elevations. Since we moved here, we’ve counted down the days until the temps were consistently warm enough to allow those gates to reopen. Well, today was that day! Our family enjoyed a leisurel...

  Looking back to a year ago, we remember the last outing, the last activity, the last bit of normalcy before all of our worlds changed. We also remember the feelings of anxiety and fatigue we had to keep up with the schedules we had created. We remember the conversations we were already having about the changes we were ready to make in our lives. We wanted to slow down, we wanted to do things with intention, we wanted to go after the life we had always dreamed of living. We were already focused on budgeting and eliminating unnecessary expenses, and we were already making progress decluttering our home and getting rid of things that were no longer important to us. We were ready to start looking at other ways we could simplify our lives and move towards a life focused on the things that really matter. And that’s when everything stopped. Suddenly, there were no more early mornings, there were no more late night practices, there was no more sitting through evening lessons, there was n...

We are ordinary people who do ordinary things. Last year, we started doing ordinary things with vision and faith. It was around this time last year we were taking a good hard look at our lives. On paper, we had everything going for us. We had achieved everything we had ever set out to do. If there was a list of goals, we had marked everything off. We attended college, got advanced degrees, bought a house, bought a bigger house, had good-paying jobs, got even better-paying jobs, bought stuff, bought more stuff, more cars, bigger cars, more stuff. In the midst of earning and spending money, we found ourselves buried in student loan debt, trapped by the things we thought we wanted, and living every month paycheck to paycheck. It was around this time last year we struck a new vision for our lives and we started working towards it with the faith it could be achieved. We wanted out of debt, we wanted out of the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, we wanted out from underneath everything we had acqui...