It's the end (of this trip).

After months of living abroad where eggs cost an average of $3 a dozen, as well as free farm eggs in Tennessee, I want to personally ask President Trump to Make Eggs Affordable Again (MEAA).

Preferably by Easter.

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When we started this travel adventure, I was fairly certain I was meant to let go of everything else and shift my obsessive need to be productive towards the kids. Yay for them!

But going quiet is hard for me. And maybe it's hard for you too, in a world that says only what is "shared" is purposeful and only pictures prove it happened.

So I went quiet. I quit my part-time job, and I barely showed up (and still don't) on social media. I just kept this little space to keep scratching notes so I wouldn't forget.

Meanwhile, I felt like I was going mental in the head.

Then we landed in Didsbury, England. Our first Sunday there, we looked for a church my mom had been recommended by someone she met in D.C.

That seemed like a solid start, right? We found the church just two blocks away. This whole European adventure, we have not had a car. Once we landed in a city, everything was only what we could walk to. And we have walked. Kids and I were averaging 6 miles a day by the end.

To find a church that has been personally recommended so close that we didn't even need the stroller....well, shoot, that is Divine. Let's go!

And so we went. The message that day felt like a letter hand-delivered to my husband. 🙌🏽

That Friday, I went back for the prayer night.

I tucked myself into the back, where the shadows were darkest. After a couple of songs, a woman stepped up to the front, holding what looked like a brown clump of mud.

"This is a hyacinth......”

She proceeded to share that hyacinths need to be potted and then shoved away in cool, dark places where the sun doesn’t shine for weeks on end. You’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing is happening in that dark place. How can it? A little water here and there, but no light? No warmth? Don’t plants need those things to bloom and grow?

Not a hyacinth.

It’s in the dark, cool, hidden place that the work of root-building is happening - a whole lot of unseen depth being grown to support what is coming next.

Do you see where this is going?? Of course you do, because you is smart.

After a few weeks, we were to pull those potted hyacinths out of the back of our closet and place it where the light of the winter sun would cause it to bloom. Maybe even in time for Christmas.

Well, obviously, I BAWLED.

You know the kind - the ugly heaving cry when your number has just been read, and you are knocked off your feet with the truth of what just slammed into your chest. You have been seen.

“Joanna, I didn’t ask you to go dark to ignore you. This is a season of growing roots so that you’ll be able to support the bloom when it’s time.” -God

So I planted that little bulb, and I carried it all around England, hiding it in closets and cupboards and making sure we didn’t forget it every time we moved. A couple of weeks before Christmas, I pulled it out and set it in the window. And with all the sun that England gets it very…..slowly…..bloomed.

Two days before we left the country, it flowered. I choked up a little as I left it with someone - a tangible reminder that though I might feel disoriented, unsettled, and lost, I am not forgotten or unseen.

I’m just in a season of rooting.

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These last three weeks since we arrived in the States have found us mostly hiding in Tennessee. We've eased into seeing some friends. Tried to remember how to drive a car - just like riding a bike! Which, if you've seen me ride a bike recently,y should terrify you.

But mainly, I've sat in the tension of the no longer and not yet. The trip that seemed to stretch before us endlessly is somehow done. And the schedule and rhythm we had is going to go with it. But so did the rhythm that we had before we left. It's not there anymore.

Nothing is there unless we put it back. The kids won't return to school with their peers. We're not in ballet, piano, basketball, etc, etc, etc.

We go back to an empty slate.

But somewhere in me, I also feel the pull to return to expectations—expectations of what we will join, how we will show up, or even what we will share about our time abroad.

I don't have an answer yet.

My hyacinth may have bloomed in England, but I still feel tucked away in a dark closet, trying to grow my roots without a clear sense of when the sun will burst in. Most days I want to stay tucked away. And that may be a gift, delighting in this change of being.

Or it might be me hiding. TBD.

All that to say, we’re home!

#MEAA-

Jo x

P.S. The church my mom recommended that was such an encouragement? Turns out she got the name wrong. And the city. The right one was five hours away. 😱

God will find you when He’s got something for you to hear. Make sure you’re listening.