I Facetimed with my mom and dad a couple days ago, hedged in some conversation around my kids clamoring for the screen and making crazy faces and showing off their latest tricks and toys and missing teeth. It must be like watching a circus. But in between the shenanigans, mom and dad asked how I was. Coming from someone you love, “How are you?” can open large cans of worms.

I gave a stream of consciousness answer. “Good. Work is going well. The kids are good. Ryan is good.” And then I dug in a little deeper. “It’s busy, we’re all busy. Time is flying by. We are entrenched in the school year routine, our calendars runneth over. Now that I’m almost full time, it’s the kids and the house and the job and everything else, too.” I then I found the heart of what I wanted to say, “But I feel settled. This feels like home.”

There’s something so satisfying at getting to the heart of what you’re feeling, isn’t there? Even more satisfying is to have someone understand what you mean. My mom replied, “It’s like the Lincoln years.” I knew what she meant. Our Lincoln years were the years that my family lived in Nebraska. Those ten years were a sweet pocket of time when my sisters and I were growing up, all together under one roof with my mom and dad. The Lincoln years are my childhood, a time when I most definitely felt settled. My parents, in the heart of their parenting years, felt the grounding force of a routine focused on kids and school and holidays and summer vacations and the hum of family life. I hear the sweet satisfaction in their voices when they talk about those years, set between their own just-starting-out years and the years when we were all teenagers, upsetting the nest, and then college kids, jumping out of it.

After my teens and the searching years of my twenties and the series of moves and personal shake-ups of the past few years, I feel settled like I haven’t felt for a very long time. Where I am feels like home. I feel connected to the deep purpose of mothering and the satisfaction of a job that I love. My husband and I, after 10 years of marriage, have a bond and a routine and a history that makes the foundation of our family. We have good friends. We feel a sense of mission in our church and school. Now that we’ve been in Miami two years, familiarity surrounds us and this place has a worn-in feeling. All of this contributes to an overall feeling of settledness.

And for that, I’m grateful. Thank you, Lord, for bringing me to this time and this place.

What makes it all the sweeter, of course, is that life is ever-changing. So I’m treasuring this sweet pocket of stillness, these Lincoln-years, for as long as they last.