Why Did We Move to Rhinelander?

I loved living near my family and long time friends. It never occurred to me to want to move from the area that I call my hometown. Sure, we moved three miles away from there, but that's nothing nowadays and I felt content for quite a while. We finally had our dream home, lush gardens, great schools for our kids, a wonderful and extremely supportive church home, lots of friends and family living near us, a nice job. What more could we want?

Sure, the usual things weighed on me, but everyone has problems. Finances, kids teasing my son, and I wasn't feeling well and was often too tired to do much of anything. The doctors said that happens as you age and didn't feel that there was really anything wrong with me. There wasn't really anything that I could do about any of those problems though. We were generally pretty happy, so why rock the boat?

Shortly before my father died this small voice inside of me grew louder and more insistent. I guess it had been there before but I never listened to it. I thought it was greed driving me to ask my husband to look for a promotion. We always lived beyond our means so getting a promotion wouldn't make things any easier anyway, right?

One day, I started listening to it. I prayed that God would show us the direction that we should take. I talked to my husband about it. We gave it a lot of prayerful consideration. Son would be moving to a new school this year, his good friends would be sent to the school across town and the kids that lived in our neighborhood and teased him so much that he never wanted to play outside would be going to his school. Peanut would be starting kindergarten. Dad was making plans to move to Ohio to live near my sister who was studying to be a nurse.

We called several different real tors over to look at our house. We didn't want to make the move if all of the elements didn't fit. They all commented that our house was immaculate, it wouldn't be a problem to sell, and we could get $230,000 for it. That was more than enough to pay off the mortgage we owed and pay a good down payment on a new home. It was the perfect time to move.

We both agreed. Cheeshead decided to start actively looking for a good place to move our family. As the openings showed up, I researched the areas, the schools, and costs of living for each of the openings. Cheesehead put in for the towns we were interested in. I prayed that God would give us a great new town to call home.

One day a job in Rhinelander showed up. I had heard of it since it's not far from where my husband's dad grew up. Some of FIL's family still lives within 45 minutes of our house. We really were never very close to any of them since they don't venture far from home. I barely even knew many of them, but it would be a great opportunity to get to know them better.

He got an interview at the store in Rhinelander. It isn't any further from his parent's house than we already lived, so they volunteered to watch the kids while we checked the area out.

The town was a relaxed pace, not much traffic, and the people we met were extremely friendly which was a plus coming from the bustling suburbs of the Twin Cities. There were a few stores and restaurants, but not so many that I'd be tempted to go shopping as an almost daily hobby and overindulge in eating out which had become bad habit for us. We drove by the YMCA and saw many nice little schools neatly tucked into neighborhoods. That was nice compared to the sprawling schools in the area we came from. Lovely historic homes lined the streets. It seemed like there was a church on just about every corner of town that we drove by. It really was a perfect fit for us, God had helped us to find the perfect town to raise our family in.

The night before the interview, we stopped in to see the store. We wandered the aisles checking things out. We checked the distance from the hotel to the store so he wouldn't be late the next day. As we wandered the aisles he saw the store manager and introduced himself. We chatted for a while with him before heading off.

There was one other person who interviewed for the job after my husband's interview. He felt pretty confident about it, but we had to wait for the results. The other candidate hadn't interviewed yet. We shouldn't count our chickens before they're hatched.

I just wrote this story on my "new" blog and decided to share it here with you too. So far, so good. We love it in our new home even more than we did our old home.

Thank you for stopping by. Please leave me a message. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy