A New Chapter

We all have a story. Every single one of us. When I see images of perfect families and perfect moments plastered over social media I can quickly forget that those images represent only a moment in a part of a bigger story, and are not the full story itself.

Like a great sentence hidden in the pages of a book, they do not always represent the whole. In the same way, there is more to our story than the smiling faces and beautiful vistas we hope to share as part of this blog. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," rings strangely familiar. As we share it is important to us that we create an authentic space for our experiences as a family, as we spend this chapter of our lives reassessing where we are in our story.

Over the course of our 13 year marriage we have been asking ourselves some hard questions. Many of them centre around the gap between our spiritual and ethical convictions and what we actually live out in our daily lives. This feeling of disconnect is the space that has made up many of our days. Some call this a holy discontent. Over the years we have found ourselves living out our convictions only at a comfortable level because, let's face it, living by all of our convictions all of the time is just plain hard. Imagine if we all lived, for example, by beliefs we upheld about human kindness, sacrificial sharing, equal treatment, materialism, our role in the environment, or how we care for our families one hundred percent of the time? This disconnect has weighed increasingly heavily on us over the past year, especially as it pertains to our faith based convictions of love and service. We felt it was time to take a big step back, slow down, and clarify our vision for our marriage, our family, and the use of our personal talents and gifts.

So...we bought a bus.

If that seems bizarre to you, then we are already friends. Let's just call this chapter "living by our conviction of whimsy."

It was sometime early this spring, after Victor and I had already decided that we wanted to live differently, that I was late night blog-surfing and came across a story of a family who had left the suburban 9-5 life and packed up their kiddos in a school bus to see the world. It all seemed blissfully romantic and adventurous as I shared it with Victor, but not something that I thought we would ever replicate or give serious consideration to.

A few weeks later we pulled into a gravel driveway in rural Guelph, Ontario, and like starry eyed dreamers, drove home with a yellow 2003 Ford E450 bluebird micro-bird bus.

Victor started a partial sabbatical in August and most of August and September were spent completely tearing out and renovating this converted bus into a home and school for a family of five. With the help of my parents and several friends, I think we may have completed a bus conversion in record time.

So here we are setting out on this next chapter in life's big adventure. We are pilgrims, wonder-seekers, a home, a school, and most of all a family full of flaws, quirks, and messes squeezed into a space much smaller than we are accustomed to. We will see how it goes.

We are on a hunt for God's handiwork displayed in nature and people, and his voice in our lives. This physical journey mirroring a spiritual pilgrimage within. We will not run from questions that gnaw at our souls, and as we ask the bigger questions and listen with open ears, we anticipate Divine answers and hope for the courage to take steps forward.

If you'd like to join us on this journey, we'd love to have you along to explore the wonders of creation and the ponderings of the soul.