We landed at 1:00 a.m., too tired to notice much of anything. A few hours later, I threw open the curtains and gasped. The sky was cloudless. The trees were the greenest I had ever seen. Everything felt bright and alive.

My camera reel from our first day is filled with evergreen trees, sweeping landscapes, and the glistening water of the Puget Sound. But no mountain. On our drive along the coast, we caught glimpses of it through thick trees, but I could never fully take it in.

On our second morning, over breakfast with my husband and the couple traveling with us (Greg and Angie), I shared the two things I had asked God for that day.

“We learned so much about the area and the culture yesterday,” I said, recounting our visits to coffee shops, local stores, and a library. “God is giving us a glimpse of what life would look like here.”

“But I still feel like there are so many unknowns—especially about the homeschool community,” I added. “So I asked God that, when we go to church this morning, a homeschooling mom would walk right up to me and introduce herself.”

It felt like a bold thing to ask. But after how clearly he had worked the day before, I found myself hoping he might answer just as plainly again.

Our friends encouraged me to trust the Lord and then asked about my second request.

“To see Mt. Rainier!” I said with a grin. They laughed at my somewhat frivolous request, and we loaded into the car.

As we drove to the interstate, my husband and I kept processing the day before with our friends. We confessed concerns we had about the financial feasibility of moving out here.

“I know God can provide,” my husband said. “I just wish we knew how.”

“There it is!” I interrupted our conversation with a shout. “It’s Mt. Rainier!” When we merged on the interstate, I suddenly had a wide-open view of the majestic white mountain. Tears pricked my eyes while I rolled down the window to get the best picture of the mountain in all her glory.

“God’s already answering your prayers,” Angie responded after we’d filled our camera with photos. “I know he will provide for your other needs, too.”

I nodded, silently thanking God for answering my small, silly prayer and asking that he strengthen my faith in him to answer my big prayers, too.

Thirty minutes later, we arrived at the church early and took our seats. A woman from the praise team came off the stage to greet us. We explained why we were visiting, made small talk, and asked questions about the area.

At last, I asked the question burning in my chest, “Where do your kids go to school?”

My new friend Sarah smiled broadly, “We actually homeschool.”

My mouth dropped open. Greg began to cry. My husband shook his head in disbelief.

Sarah looked confused at our response until I explained my prayer request from that morning.

“You’re God’s answer to my prayer,” I admitted through tears. We chatted about co-ops, outdoor opportunities, and state regulations.

Later, I also told Sarah about my second, “silly” request I had made of God that morning. “Rainier is absolutely breathtaking. It seems like it’s right here, even while it’s more than an hour away.”

“We have a saying in Washington,” Sarah told me. “When we can see Rainier, we say, ‘The mountain is out.’ Most days during the rainy season, we won’t glimpse Rainier for weeks. But when we do, it’s cause for celebration.”

It was time for the service to start, so she returned to her place on stage. As we sang with fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sarah said.

Rainier is always there. Sometimes we just can’t see it behind the clouds.

On our final day of the trip, we experienced a typical cold, rainy day in the Pacific Northwest. I looked to the horizon where I knew the majestic mountain stood, but I couldn’t even distinguish an outline because of all the clouds and fog.

Yet I knew it was there.

God showed us his providence so clearly on that trip. Knitting our hearts together with the pastor and his wife. Meeting possible partners in ministry in the area. Learning more about the military families there. Providing us with undeniable assurance that this was exactly where God was calling our family to move.

The mountain was out: we could see all God’s glory and provision.

But I know there will be days and weeks, maybe even months, when I won’t be able to glimpse his goodness and provision.

There will be grief when saying goodbye, trying to explain to my kids why we are taking them from the only home they’ve known. There will be financial struggles, wondering how we will manage doubling a mortgage payment. There will be loneliness, trying to make new friends in an unfamiliar city.

There will be rainy and foggy days when I can’t glimpse why God moved our family across the country. Days marked by grief, trials, and questions I can’t answer.

But the mountain doesn’t disappear just because I can’t see it.

And neither does God.

So I can sing with the psalmist, “I lift my eyes toward the mountains. Where will my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1-2).

Some days, the mountain will be out—clear, breathtaking, undeniable.

And on the days it isn’t, I’ll keep lifting my eyes anyway.

But this decision didn’t happen overnight. To understand how we got here, I have to take you back fifteen years.

Let’s say you met twenty-year-old Bethany at her favorite campus coffee shop, bought her a cappuccino chip muffin and a turtle latte, and asked her what she dreamed thirty-five-year-old Bethany would be doing. She would have said she wanted to be married and have kids. She wanted to write and serve in ministry—maybe even publish a book. She wanted a comfortable house close to her family and to every convenience.

If that college junior could look at my life now, she would have said that I had everything she could have dreamed of.

But at twenty, I also began to feel God calling me to something bigger than my dreams of American Christian success. I was born and raised in Alabama as a minister’s daughter and had attended a Christian school from preschool through my undergraduate degree. Southern Christianity was ingrained in me. I knew how to say “yes ma’am” and “share Jesus without fear.” But I didn’t actually need to do it that much because I was surrounded by people who grew up in the same culture and church I had.

But the summer of my junior year in college, while working at a Christian youth camp, I heard a church planter share about the need for the gospel in other parts of the country. I vividly remember him showing us a picture of the United States, with tiny white dots indicating a church presence. My home state and the states surrounding it were bright white.

Yet the rest of the map remained dark, with a few smatterings of dots here and there.

I was stunned. Raised in a southern Baptist church with a huge emphasis on missions, I knew the statistics about the need around the world—but I had never realized there was such a need in the country I called home. These people shared my language and culture yet had limited access to the gospel. I knew that wasn’t right, and I wanted to do something about it.

I remember calling my boyfriend, Joseph, that night and telling him I felt a stirring in my heart that maybe the Lord wouldn’t keep me in Alabama—and being shocked that he’d felt a similar stirring.1

Maybe he was calling us to move our tiny lights to a darker place, but we weren’t quite sure how.

For years, that moment stayed tucked quietly in the background of my life.2 That boyfriend became my husband. We had three children and bought a beautiful home forty-five minutes from my parents and within walking distance from our favorite park. I published a book and regularly speak at women’s ministry events. My husband and I lead in ministries at our local church. Our family is thriving. I’ve achieved everything that twenty-year-old me wanted.

Yet that’s not where God chose to end my story.

The call I felt from God that summer seemed like a distant echo, and I began to wonder if we’d misheard him. Maybe he used that calling to bring Joseph and me closer together and to inspire us to live on mission daily. Moving now felt a lot harder with careers, children, and a mortgage.

Because of our shared love of church planting, though, we try to go on trips our church takes to serve our church planting partners. Last summer, we took a trip to Crestview, Florida, to help a church lead a day camp for kids and a family outreach event. We thought we would just be sacrificing a week of our summer break, but one conversation while we were there changed our lives forever.

That week, we had dinner with the pastor and his wife to learn more about the planting organization they were a part of—a network of Pillar churches that intentionally plants outside military bases to serve military families. My husband and I were inspired by their mission and their heart for seeing the gospel spread.

Then the pastor told us that the next Pillar church would be planted in a year or so in northwest Washington.

I’ve never been one to say, “God said this,” but in that moment, I had the clearest sense that God was calling our family to join this church plant. I looked at my husband, eyes wide, heart racing, and he nodded. God was telling him the exact same thing.

We left that dinner in tears—both joy and fear. We knew without a doubt that God was leading our family in this direction, but we weren’t sure how exactly we would get there.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I took a trip to Washington to meet with the pastor and his wife who will be planting a church outside Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Seattle. We explored the surrounding neighborhoods—visiting grocery stores, libraries, and restaurants to learn more about the community. We were in awe of the lush forests, sparkling water, and the majestic Mt. Rainier.

The reality of what we were saying “yes” to was also terrifying. This move would mean saying goodbye to my family in the South, to the beautiful community we’ve built at our church, and the only home our children know.

Yet God, in his grace and kindness, answered little prayers while we were there (such as getting a cloudless view of Rainier) as a reminder that he will provide everything we need in his time. Each day, our assurance only grew that this was the next chapter for our family.

As we prayed, we began to see how God has uniquely prepared us for this—through our years of ministry in the local church, my husband’s military service, and a growing desire to reach people who may have never experienced authentic Christian community. God began weaving this calling into our story fourteen years ago, yet we never could have predicted this would be our next chapter.

We flew home, knowing this is exactly where God is calling us to move, and yet we still have so many questions.

Ever since God called us to Washington last summer, I’ve been thinking about the story in Scripture when Joshua leads the Israelites into the Promised Land. The generation that had died in the desert had witnessed the Lord miraculously delivering them out of Egypt and parting the Red Sea for them to walk through on dry land.

Joshua is leading their children and grandchildren into the Promised Land they’ve been waiting to enter for forty years. There’s only one thing standing in their way: the Jordan River. But they’ve heard the stories. They know that all Moses had to do was raise his staff, and the water was divided into two.

This time, though, the Lord’s miraculous guidance would look different. “When the soles of the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap” (Joshua 3:13). This time, the Israelite priests would have to step into the rushing waters before God stopped the waters. They had to put their feet into an overflowing, surging river in faith that God would make a way as he had before.

And that’s exactly where I feel our family is right now—standing before a rushing river. We believe God is calling us to step into the water before he parts it.

We have so many questions about the logistics of moving across the country, the strain on our finances, the unknowns surrounding our kids’ education, and so much more. As I lie in bed at night, I feel wave after wave of anxiety and uncertainty threaten to knock me over.

Yet, we are learning to hold fast to two things: the calling of God for our future and the character of God in our past. We have never been more certain that this is the plan the Lord has for us, so we can be sure that he will make a way. And we have witnessed God’s faithfulness to us time and time again—and we know that this time won’t be any different.

This is why the next part of the story matters so much to me. As the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground, Joshua commanded them to take up twelve stones from the river floor, “So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever” (Joshua 4:7).

This series of articles will serve as memorial stones for me.

I’m hoping to chronicle our journey to the Pacific Northwest as a way of memorializing how God demonstrates his faithfulness to us. This is for my faith—as a way to set up markers to remember his provision when I’m not sure how we will get through. It is for my children’s faith—when they grieve our move and ask me “why,” I can point them back to God’s purpose for our family. And I pray that it is for your faith as well—that the story of God guiding us through uncertain waters to a new place would encourage you to follow him, even when the way seems scary or impossible.

These stories will be like collecting stones in the Jordan River, setting up an Ebenezer at the river’s edge, so that we can see how God has been our helper every step of the way.

To recap: our family is moving to Washington at the beginning of next year to support a new church plant through discipleship, outreach, and leadership. Would you stand with us at the riverbed as we step out in faith—trusting God to provide and remembering his faithfulness every step of the way?

I know you probably have so many questions, and there are so many details I left out and stories untold. I’ll share more in the coming months, but if you have any questions or encouragements, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.