It always seems like time gets away from us. Even when our work was halted for six months because of Covid-19, we kept ourselves busy with projects. At first we spent time doing things that had been on our to-do list for months, neglected house projects we always talked about doing, like converting the solid wood door from our dining room to our sunroom into a full glass door and finally putting house numbers by our front door. Then we moved on to the neglected yard projects like graveling our driveway and putting in a paver walkway to the front door. Eventually our to-do list dwindled and we started doing things that we had never even thought about or had put on a to-do list like pressure washing the shed and making and installing an outdoor shower. Cassie even got so desperate for something to accomplish that she literally washed the mailbox. Jordan weeded and de-thatched the entire yard and I got a black eye from hanging the hammock. We worked tirelessly on home and yard improvements until we couldn’t think of anything else we wanted or needed to do (with the exception of cleaning out our garden shed, which we didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole), and our house and yard looked better than it ever had.
All along, we kept a positive perspective, never taking for granted the fact that we had a home during the “stay at home” order. We often thought about how perfect God’s plan was to bring us here, in a home of our own for this pandemic. If we had still been living out of our suitcases as we had for nearly five years, it would have been a strain on us and our families to live together for months on end. Despite not having work, we felt blessed. Each day, we trusted in the Lord to provide for us in His time as we’ve relied on Him to do for years. We knew work would come eventually, we just didn’t know when, but that’s always the nature of our work and God has never let us down. As spring came in full bloom and the cardinals nested in our blooming azalea bushes, we were comforted by God’s promise in Matthew 6:26, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
By April, we had 20 cancelled flights, and many more to come. Our grueling spring and summer travel schedule to Philadelphia, five islands in Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Serbia, Greece, and beyond was no longer even a possibility. But we continued on with our to-do lists, getting to enjoy some of our neglected hobbies that give us much joy. Cassie scrapbooked years worth of photos, airline tickets, foreign currencies and other things from our travels, filling hundreds of plastic covered pages with memories dear to her heart. Jordan brewed beer upon beer as the seasons changed from his Pandemic Pale Ale and Leftovers IPA to his very tasty coffee blonde ale in late summer. We worked on creative personal projects too. Jordan is a talented songwriter and musician, so he wrote and recorded an entire album from fragments of songs that he’s had in his head for nearly a decade and some he conceived and brought to fruition in just one day. After recording his guitar and vocal parts, he then recorded his childhood best friend playing the drum parts on all the songs. The editing and perfecting of the songs (which is called mastering) took the longest, but their band, Scraps, digitally released the album, Decades, which is available to purchase on Bandcamp and iTunes and to stream on Spotify. Cassie started writing a book she never thought she’d have the time to write about our experience thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. Writing a book is no joke and takes a LONG time, but she’s about halfway into it.
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