Our Ticket Home

I started blogging when I was serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints back in 2016 called Kenz in Knox. A few years after that blog was completed I printed it into a book that I will treasure forever. 

In 2020 when we received news that my husband Jaden was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University's cybersecurity graduate program I knew I wanted to keep track of our time away from home in Pittsburgh. I started a second blog called Peaches in Pitt and focused it around a family tradition my mom implemented where every night around the dinner table we would go around the room and each share a peach - something good about our day - and a pit - something not so good about our day. I came to realize overtime that when a peach pit is planted it eventually results in peaches. My mom always says "out of something bad comes something good." I have found this to ring more and more true each passing year and lesson learned. 

I loved recording our adventures in Pittsburgh and as it wound down I knew I wanted to keep writing. Writing grounds me. I was in awe that nearly every time I wrote I always had more peaches to write about than pits. I think it's because when I write I become more grateful. I process my emotions better and see a clearer perspective. So I'm going to continue. 

Because after almost two years in Pittsburgh and a summer internship in Chicago, Jaden completed his masters degree and our next plan was to move to Dallas after graduation for his new job. However, life is full of crazy twists and turns and his start date was bumped into the next year. We explored our options back in Utah and he was generously offered a new and better position at a company in SLC. So in the words of my mom (she's a wise and quotable lady) we're, "home 5 years earlier than we thought you would be." 

As I contemplated continuing to write and still thought we were Dallas bound, I had the idea of making a third blog and calling it "The Dallas Detour" thinking it was ultimately a detour on our way home to Utah. Now that we're back in Utah sooner than we had originally thought I decided to transfer my peaches, pits and lessons learned to this new blog called "Our Ticket Home." When we were initially disappointed that our plans fell apart and would tell people about our change in plans we would always come back to the phrase, this is "our ticket home." We wanted to come back to Utah and be back with our family and friends and we got the opportunity to do it sooner than we thought. Slowly we came to realize that as much as it felt like our masterpiece of a plan was falling apart it really is just the Master Himself piecing it together in ways more beautiful than anything we could dream up. 

So that's what this blog is going to be about. There will still be journaling of daily happenings, there will be peaches and there will be pits and I'm sure lots of lessons learned, but above all there will be stories and experiences of things falling into place as I look for Christ in the details because HE is truly Our Ticket Home.