15 years in the middle of nowhere

We are coming up on the 15th anniversary of my husband taking the church here. That is hard to believe! 15 years in the middle of nowhere Kansas!

When we first moved here, we lived way out in the country. It was such a peaceful place, so different from the big city of Wichita. I loved it! We had a 3 year-old, a sixteen-month old, and one on the way, so I needed a little peace in my life. No one was in school yet, so we spent our days playing and pretending. The double seater on the swing was our vehicle to many places (while singing Barney songs), and a big hollow log was our boat, spaceship, you name it. We still have that log, it has moved with us 3 times. It's falling apart, but I have a hard time parting with this old friend of ours. I do tend to get attached to strange things...

We had a landlord named Bo, not Little Bo Peep mind you, but Bo the Farmer, although for all I know they might be related. He was (and is) a great guy, except when he'd come into the kitchen early in the morning to get water to mix a calf bottle and scare the daylights out of me. There was another time he wasn't such a great guy. There was this stump you could see from the kitchen window, and if you squinted just right, it looked like the Statue of Liberty! I loved showing it to visitors, although for some reason most of them had a hard time squinting just right. Bad eyesight or something... Anyway, one day I looked out the kitchen window and...GASP! My statue of liberty was gone! Apparently Bo the Farmer thought it was a nuisance so he hooked a chain to it and pulled it out of the ground! Totally ruined the place for me. Can you imagine getting rid of a national monument like that?? After that there was nothing left to do but move. Ok, we did move, but only because Bo the Farmer found himself needing a place to live. Otherwise I might have put up with the change of scenery a bit longer.

So, back to the present...here we are, 15 years in this place God put us in, and I still love it. I love the church people, I love the small town-ness (is that even a word?), I love the wheatfields at harvest time, I love how people know your name. I'll be honest, I didn't want to move here in the beginning because I thought I'd make a rotten pastor's wife (after all, I don't even play the piano!!), but thankfully God didn't listen to my reasonings and knew what I needed. And for that I will always be thankful!