How the Journey Began! (part one)

For those who did not know, we have moved….to Two Harbors….to run a small ma-and-pa resort….on Lake Superior.  We are so honored to be the new owners of Gooseberry Cabins located in the Castle Danger community just south of Gooseberry Falls State Park.  Although this may seem like a sudden and drastic move for a farm boy and his southern-born wife, you can be assured that the process that God has been working in our lives is either sudden or easy.  If you only have a few minutes, look us up on gooseberrycabins.net and see a little of our new location.  We would love to have you visit us up here and be looking for us on social media soon!

If you want to know pretty much the whole story, grab a bev and settle in for the gritty exciting details.

Seldom in life do you get to expand the focus backwards on your life and see how little bits and pieces that seemed random or disconnected are actually an integral part of God’s sovereign plan in your lives.  My first visit to Duluth happened in middle school, and Christopher was even younger.  We did not know each other at the time, but we were both equally enthralled with this giant body of water and gorgeous rocky landscape that is the North Shore of Minnesota.

With this love for Duluth, it was a natural pick for our honeymoon destination almost 19 years ago.  Subsequently, we came back up north for our 7th anniversary.  It was at that point; we were truly hooked, lined, and sinkered.  Soon we were visiting the North Shore pre-planting and post-harvest every year, with an occasional anniversary or birthday weekend snuck in as well.  If any of our friends every needed a destination recommendation, we always suggested the Duluth/Two Harbors area.

Our current journey started with a tugging at our souls that God wanted us to be more actively involved with people.  Not necessarily people we were comfortable with and had known all of our lives, but people who we could impact for a moment in time.  We had been events coordinators at our church for the past 7 years and through this time period God had really honed our hospitality hearts.  With the declining agricultural economy and multiple families on one farm, we started searching for God’s leading in a different direction for our family.  Many conversations and many internet searches and many thoughts on future directions, led us back to the North Shore.  The name for this blog came to me after one of our visits to see this future business of ours.  The definition of pilgrim is “a person who undertakes a journey to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.”

So as to not overwhelm you with too much detail at once, that is the lengthy intro to my next post about how God specifically led us to Gooseberry Cabins!