It's been a long time since my last post and I can hardly wait to tell of all the changes in our life!  As you know, God has us headed to Italy next summer to work as church planters.  That one, seemingly insignificant sentence....of 13 little words....words so easy a first grader could read them...well...that sentence is making big changes in our lives!  Huge changes!  Changes of phenomenal proportions!

Change #1:
We are selling all of our crap  stuff  blessings.  Over the 25 years that Ben and I have been married, we have accumulated a lot of "blessings".  The things really have been blessings, but some of those turn into just "stuff" at some point.  Don't you find that at your place as well?  Well, when you have 25 years of married life of things, and then 5 children worth of things...that's a lot of things. 

I am feeling lighter as each item moves along out of my home.  It is freeing to share our items with others.  I am loving the empty spaces I have as I walk back into my home after sending another lovely off with someone else to love.  Space is nice.

I feel tremendously blessed to have so many items.  They all represent a moment in time.  A holiday, a special trip, a surprise, a just because, a need.  I can remember just about all of it as I look at the things.  But the lovely thing is that I still remember it even after that thing is gone! 

Change #2:
We have enrolled our children in public school.  I'm not sure that most can understand how big of a transition this is for us.  We have homeschooled for 17 years!  Our four youngest have not even been in a school (maybe to pick up a cousin now that I think about it...but that would be the extent of it), let alone enrolled for the whole day. 

When we move to Italy, we are enrolling them in public school there.  I  mean Italian, only speak Italian, all books are in Italian, will have to actually look the the pics on the bathroom doors to see which looks more like you...Italian!  No Italian as a second language/dual language classes.  Just plain Italian all day.  We thought (I'm quite sure God put this thought in my head.  Not clever enough to think it on my own) that school here would at least be a baby step to help with the transition next school year in the ALL ITALIAN school.

So far things are going pretty well.  Positives and negatives...but we had those in our homeschool as well.  God has shown us in small ways that He is there with us, with our kids.  I have had a couple rough days, but I can't explain adequately enough how present God has been and the peace the only He could wash over me. 

Change #3:
How we spend our money....especially as Christmas approaches.  Our family goes over the top, to say the least, at Christmas.  No apologies from us about that, either!  :)  We love it!  But this year, anything we buy either has to be able to be taken over (which is extremely limited), totally consumed, or has lived out its life span by July (played with as much as it can and able to be thrown away or broken, etc).  This really changes our thoughts on what to get.  The three older girls can understand the changes and can have a bit more of a delayed gratification idea (saving things now to get some new things in Italy)....but the boys have a bit of a harder time getting that.

Not impossible.  And Christmas will come and go and be amazing in the DeBusk home as usual...but changes nonetheless.

We are excited for the changes....we are nervous for the changes...we welcome the changes....and we curse the changes.  Just a few of the emotions that flit around any minute of the day around here.