Thank You, First Baptist Carrollton Family

We tell our oldest son, “Listen and obey the first time”.  This summer we have struggled with that in our own adult lives.  Over the past eight years our church home has been at First Baptist Carrollton.  We served in numerous capacities including spending five years teaching in the youth group.  This church family met us at the hospital when we rushed Gabriel to the ER at 6 days old because he was vomiting blood and then continued a natural flow of visitors/helpers/friends the entire day so we were never alone (and never had to eat hospital food!).  Over these eight years we have “checked in with God” a few times to make sure we were still where He wanted us to be.  The first couple times He confirmed in different ways that we should still be involved and serving at FBCC.  But the most recent time we sought His opinion the answer was different.  It was then that we realized He had been pruning and working in our lives for over a year to prepare us for this - to let go and step out into something new and …… unknown. 

As a planner, organizer and complete “Type A” personality, you can imagine my horror when we realized God was calling us away from our church family with only the instruction to invest ourselves in our more immediate community.  So today we treasured our last “normal” day at FBCC.  Every familiar face that said “hi” or stopped to speak to me felt like a tiny kick in the gut.  “How long before we have this again, God?  This is HOME.”  So I have to believe that although we are sad that our time at Carrollton is over, God has something amazing ahead of us.  I hold to the hope that in a few years we can look back at this point and see how everything fit together and flowed perfectly.  But as we walked towards the doors to leave this morning, I admit I pulled out my sunglasses well before we got outside in an attempt to hide the tears. 

Thank you to everyone at First Baptist Carrollton who has loved on our boys, who was there during the difficult times, who served with us, and who we will still call friends.  I know we aren’t going far away and we’ll still be around, but it already isn’t the same.