Core Truths

Logging on to social media has been a bit eery this week. Every time I open a social media app, there are the curated memories from “on this day blank number of years ago.” For us, it has been “on this day three years ago.” Three years ago we took this picture on our very first waterfall hike. Three years. Three. Short. Years. The memories popping up are from our 2018 summer vacation when we visited the Smoky Mountains for the first time. Our pictures are us at a waterfall, us river rafting, us on a hiking trail, us at another waterfall. There we are, all seven of us crowded into the screen for a selfie, living it up for the five days a year we had to do what we wanted to do where we wanted to do it. What the social media memories do not show is what happened next. How it was “on this day three years ago” when it was written on our hearts to return to the mountains, which we did—a total of four times in those three years. It doesn’t show how we wrestled with where we were versus where ...

We will never forget making those calls in early November of last year. We were calling our closest friends and even our family to tell them of the big move we were about to make. We knew for a few years we wanted to eventually move to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we knew for months we had narrowed it down to a specific area, but we hadn’t really shared that. At the time, we didn’t know we had anything to share. When we visited the area again last October, and we found our dream home, we went back to Texas and immediately got to work to get our house on the market. We knew we had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make our most tightly-held dreams come true. And so we worked quickly, and before we knew it, we were listing our house for sale. We knew the link would be shared on social media, so we knew we had to let people know what was going on before they saw it on Facebook! I called a few of my closest friends, my mom, my sisters. Brandon called his parents, aunt and uncle, and a few fr...

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...

I took this picture when we were packing up to leave Texas. I was hurriedly boxing up books when I came across these and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I paused, flipped through the empty pages, and was suddenly back to the last time I saw these last February. These are Catholic planners I bought for Brandon and I as an anniversary gift last January. I bought one for me and one for him, and we were both so eager to start using them and to start focusing more on our spiritual lives. We loved that these planners would help us to streamline our day-to-day agendas and include our spiritual goals. We loved that we were going to be intentional in carving out time to focus on growing deeper in our faith. And we loved that we were going to do this together. I guess, because life is busy, by February, we hadn’t started using them yet. Brandon and I had planned our first budget meeting together, and I thought it would be a great time to start using our planners so I brought them along. At this...

  From the moment we drove on the Blue Ridge Parkway in June 2018, we knew the mountains were calling our name. Sometime following our third trip to these mountains this past summer, I began following Blue Ridge Mountains hiking and waterfalls groups on social media. At that time, pursuing our dreams and moving to the mountains wasn’t even an option. We had a hefty mortgage and loads of student loan debt. We had just put in a pool. It was in these groups that I saw people actually hiked on the Blue Ridge Parkway during the winter months when the road is closed to traffic. I would always show Opal people’s posted pics in disbelief. I knew I wanted that to be us. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know when. But I knew I wanted to hike the snow-covered Parkway. Here we are just a few months later. We traded it all in and are now debt free. Today after church, we came home, bundled up, and headed to the Parkway. We took our traditional selfie with the National Park sign, and then we hiked on...