Finding Peaks In the Valley

Guest Post by Twindada who was "inspired to write today." Gotta love that!

Walking in the valley is never a pleasant experience, you would think. However, I truly believe it can be very rewarding. It is a constant reminder of where you have been and where you are going. My family and I have seen plenty of "valleys" in our lives. The ups have been wonderful experiences and the downs have been pretty rough.

Now we find ourselves currently living in the valley, literally. Our new house is in southwest Ohio in an area known as the Miami Valley and we are truly settled for the first time in our lives. I find it somewhat ironic when thinking about it, that after moving so many times over the years to places we thought we would be happy,that we would be led to the valley.

I grew up in the same area that we are now living. All I wanted to do was get out of there as fast as I could. I did just that. I went to college after high school across the state and never looked back. Sure, I came "home" every now and then to see my family and friends, but I never truly considered it my home. I wanted to truly experience life. Life to me was so much more than what my hometown could offer me. My dream was to move to Florida or even Tennessee (where my Dad's side of the family is from and a majority still live). Well, after finding the love of my life and marrying her (twinmama of course!), we made the leap. We moved to Florida. We lasted one year and felt a true calling (which neither one of us had experienced before) to move back to Ohio. At the time we had no idea why, but we had to get back.

We ended up in the valley. The same area we are in now. But this move was only temporary of course, until we found our true home. We talked about Florida again (who knows why, we like the torture, I guess), North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and on and on. Flash forward a couple years and we were blessed with wonderful twin girls. Life as we knew it was over. Talk about a change in things you took advantage of before! Everything was a whirlwind. We pressed a pause button on life and our #1 priority become our new family with Jelly Bean and Peanut.

Our freethinking ways pretty much ceased when it came to moving away. All of the sudden family and friends became a huge priority in life. After all, we needed the help! So much so, we made the decision to move in with my Mother-in-Law, who lives about an hour south of the valley, temporarily until we found a place to settle down - not back up in the valley of course! Fast forward another year, and an extraordinary thing happened. We were being led to the valley once again. No real explanation as to why, it was just that "feeling" rearing it's head once again.

So, here we are, with the valley being our true home. Yeah, it's tough beyond comprehension right now. But we find solace in knowing for certain that this is exactly where we are supposed to be. It wasn't easy getting here, there were a lot of obstacles in our way and we fought through all of them (with the help from the Man upstairs of course). The most amazing thing to me is that even though we may be living in a literal valley and going through struggles in the theoretical valley, it is comforting to know that our little piece of land that we own sits atop a peak where we can look out and clearly see where our true priorities lie.