Friday morning came early – very early. We packed furiously through the day. Early in the afternoon the PODS driver called to confirm pick-up time.  We asked to be his last pick-up. He came at sunset and waited as we furiously threw the last of our stuff in the pod and slammed the door down.

As the evening sky deeply darkened behind our home, the truck left with our worldly possessions – or more precisely, what we’d kept.

But our home was still strewn with stuff – stuff we really hadn’t decided to keep, take with us or put into storage.  We were exhausted, but around 8 pm we called our good friends and neighbors next door, Todd and Stacy, and they came to help. We still had a number of boxes of stuff in the house plus all the stuff we were going to take to northern California, then on to Mexico (Plan B).  They offered to ship all the boxes north for us.  But we decided just to get everything out of the house for the new tenants in the morning and we put all the boxes outside the side of the garage.

We finally packed all our clothes and final stuff into our suitcases, loaded the car and walked through our beautiful, empty house one last time. We then sat on the empty carpet of our living room, paused to reflect on what we were beginning, prayed and thanked God for the path thus far and His future leading.  We locked the house one last time about 11 PM and headed for Los Angeles for the night.