It’s been exactly one year since we received our lifeshock. One year since the volcanic news that we were no longer welcome, wanted, or needed at the farm in New Jersey landed in our inboxes. One year since a friendship we thought would last a lifetime disintegrated into ash through the text of one email. An email that left us without a home, Nathan without a job, and all of us without the future we had spent our life’s savings on.

And.

It has been exactly one year since the road to camp began to open in front of us.

Could this road have opened without that lifeshock? Sure. Absolutely. We have long longed for this kind of ministry and community living; it is what we were hoping for in New Jersey. We worked to create it with every Small Group gathering, Halloween Party, Christmas Eve celebration, and liturgical farm shenanigan we hosted in years past.

This kind of life – this intertwining of faith, land, celebration, rest, play, feasting, and worship – within the bounds of community and love – it is the only way we know how to be, and it is all we have ever wanted to share with others.

So, yes. We could have gotten to camp without a long and expensive and ulitmately heartbreaking layover in New Jersey.

But we didn’t.

It didn’t happen any other way. The lifeshock and our landing here at camp are forever part of the same story. They are part of our story, part of our whole story – past, present, and whatever is still to come.

It is what happened.

And for posterity’s sake, I wanted to mark this day with one little blog post.

As a record that we made it to the other side.

That we made it to the miracle that is our life at camp.