News from our new life

We are doing well! It has already been a while since we started into our adventure. It's time to look back on the last few weeks.

Oh and by the way, Mily, our dog, is doing well. But she didn't stay on the alp for long, when she should have stayed until the end of summer. After two days we had to pick her up again, she was completely confused and couldn't adapt at all. In the end, we decided to take her with us to Valais. Thank God, everything went really well. She gets on well with the two other dogs who live there and has adapted very well to this new place. So well, in fact, that we have now left her alone in Valais for five days and are making ourselves comfortable in a friend's apartment in Emmental.

Over the next few days, we want to consciously take time to pray for our future, listen to God and simply have some time to ourselves. Apart from a vague vision, we have nothing concrete to guide us in our long-term plans for the future. Neither people with whom we can build a communal life, nor a place, a farm or a house that we believe could be the right place for the future. Not to mention the finances that such a new project would entail.

We keep realizing that we are in a difficult phase of life, where we keep realizing what it means to have a home, to be rooted and to belong somewhere. Each individual in our family perceives it differently and deals with the situation differently. With the boys, we notice that they are more oriented towards us than usual and that we as parents are their only “place of safety”. This is actually understandable and yet there have already been two or three situations where there have been tears because we as parents have not accompanied our children “enough”. Sometimes there are also tears because the old home is simply missed. And yet we realize that it doesn't make sense for us to settle down somewhere at random, simply so that we have our own four walls! At the same time, we are very grateful for this school of life and firmly believe that God is doing it well. It is so good to know that HE is sufficient and that HE has a good plan, even if it ultimately looks very different from what we imagine at the moment. God has always been faithful in our lives, HE is faithful now and HE will be faithful in the future!

At the end of the week, we will return to Valais for another three nights. After that, we will go to the Bernese Seeland, where we can live with friends on their farm. We'll be sleeping in the tent, but we'll have more space and can even claim certain rooms in the barn for ourselves and spread out a bit. Maybe there will even be space where we can put a wardrobe so that we don't always have to live out of our clothes boxes, but can actually establish a certain order again. We are very grateful for that.
We will certainly be working there too, Marlen as part of a pre-study internship - perhaps she will then start studying (part-time) in agronomy at FH in a year's time - but we don't want to be too set in our ways at the moment.