It has been about 1 year since my last writing. I’ve been quiet, waiting, listening, fighting, attempting to string together coherent words of feelings I have discovered I do not fully understand. This season is hard. Perhaps one of, if not, the hardest I have walked, stumbled, and crawled through. This is a season of perpetual wait.

 The “wait” seemed to begin last year after our return home to the farm. After some time of wading through “the season of noise,” we seemed to regain some footing. We began the process of building our forever home, but as is normal with any building process, the waiting began. Building on old family land that you have purchased and has changed hands several times however proved to be more complicated. There were typos in deeds, issues with contracts, difficulties and errors with banks, and a near continual feeling of “hurry up and wait.” We have had a stream of seemingly endless paperwork, documents, revisions, contract changes, negotiations, and ultimately refusals due to unforeseen circumstances including the rising price of materials and unfortunate appraisals of land to which the “outside world” finds very little value in. We have fought for it, we have bargained, we have prayed, and we have found that the season of the wait will continue.

In the last week we have had to “step back and punt” as my football coach husband puts it. We have shifted our plans to building in a few more years, went and looked at mobile homes to place on our land in the meantime, have had plans drawn up for a barn, and continue to prepare for chickens and goats that will be joining the homestead soon. But most importantly, we have shifted both mentally and spiritually.

A few weeks ago, during a sermon at church a story was told about a trip that was being taken by the pastor and another pastor from a neighboring church site. In short, one pastor loves to look at fancy cars, notices them throughout the more affluent areas they traveled through, and takes time to point them out. The part of the story though that struck me was that after appreciating the cars the man then goes on to say, from what I understand, in a kind of dark, yet truthful humor, “It’s all ‘gonna burn.”

Since then, it has been a common phrase of Caleb’s when we run into further difficulties. When I feel despair over the material aspect of not having a brick-and-mortar home now, of having to wait on all the amenities of our dream house, and when I have to come to terms with another mobile home while waiting, he will simply repeat again, “Jenna, it is fleeting, It is all going to burn”.

Allow me to clarify that there is nothing wrong with a mobile home. We started our home here on the farm in a 600 square foot “fixer upper” apartment above my grandfather’s garage. It was a quaint and a fun space for 2 newlyweds. 3 weeks prior to Caden being born we moved into a repossessed mobile home that we purchased and remodeled and that is where we made a home for the next 8 years. I say that so you know that while there is a certain stigma with living in a mobile home, we are surely not “above it.”  

In fact, I am coming to the realization that those times built us. We brought our babies home to it, we laughed, we danced, we played, we fought, and we grew in it. I rocked crying babies in it while crying myself for fear of their future and my abilities as a mother. We mourned family who tragically passed while in it. We celebrated countless wins and birthday parties in it. We shared it with friends, family, and pets. We made messes and tents, measured heights on door frames, painted murals on walls, made thousands of memories, and we loved hard in it. We did all these things in a mobile home because it is not the outside or shell of a house that creates a home and a life worth living. It is the people in it, and it is the Savior binding us all together in it that builds a home. Because truthfully y’all as much as it stuns you to grasp the harshness of the statement, the material aspect of this world and the world itself really is all going to burn one day. It is fleeting. It is not eternal.

Last week at church during the closing hymn, in the midst of grief from the loss of building right now these words spoke to me,

“My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness, I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly trust in Jesus’ name.”

Lord, you are challenging me to build my life, my trust, my home on you, rather than the timber and brick that houses it. To trust not in the physical framing of the walls itself, but to trust you living amidst what I “build” inside whatever walls we reside, because you alone are eternal.

If you, my friend, are also feeling that you are in a perpetual season of waiting, take comfort in Him. Perhaps you are waiting for a job, more money, or like me, a house, while those things are most certainly important and matter, they are still worldly. As the song says, “Trust in nothing less that Jesus’ blood and righteousness” because the rest, as hard as it is to admit, as much as you feel you deserve something now, as tired as you are of waiting, the things of this world are fleeting. And as difficult as it is to realize, there is also purpose in the wait. It may just be that in the waiting you gain the refining of your soul and spirit.