Smoky Mountain High School

It’s no secret that our family is made up of a bunch of National Park Geeks, and it was on our first visit to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park a couple years ago that our lives were changed forever.

It was Summer 2018, and we completely fell in love with those peaceful smoky mountains and their stunning blue ridges. We knew it was love at first sight when we first entered the National Park, but it was one afternoon driving the Blue Ridge Parkway through the majestic mountains of western North Carolina that Opal and I looked at one another at a scenic overlook and said we have to live here. We must live here. We will live here someday.

The rest of that week, my and Opal’s conversations centered much around real estate in the area, the job market, and, probably most importantly, how could we possibly do this before retirement someday.

Of course, our three older kids wanted no part of any relocation conversation at that time, but Lucia and Maximilian were 100% on board! Lucia was almost 6-years-old at the time and Max was 3. The three of us would talk about all the things we’d do when we’d move there someday—the hiking, the waterfalls, the playing in creeks and climbing rocky cliffs. Where we described living and how we’d spend our time was in complete contrast to the suburban life we had back in Austin.

Before we ever left Tennessee that week, Lucia and I had our own inside joke. She and I would talk about how the three older kids would all graduate from high school back in Texas, but how one day we would move and she and Max would graduate from “Smoky Mountain High School.”

Now, what you need to know is this “Smoky Mountain High School” was completely fictional. I totally made it up as an inside joke with Lucia, but it stuck. I even researched to be certain and, much to our disappointment, there was no such high school by that name in all of Tennessee. We talked about “Smoky Mountain High” the remainder of our vacation, our entire drive back home, and for the next couple years. We’d dream of this new place together, imagine in detail what our life would be like there, and, sort of as a way to speak in the present tense, we’d always, always dub it “when she goes to Smoky Mountain High School.”

In the next two years, we visited those same mountains four times. And by the time we’d depart each of those trips to head back home, Lucia and I would talk about the day when she’d attend “Smoky Mountain High School.”

While Tennessee is where we first fell in love with the Smoky Mountains, it is North Carolina that we’d eventually call home. It was our fourth and final vacation here when we spent our fall break in October 2020 to see the fall foliage. It was on that trip that we found the home and the town that checked all our boxes. It was upon our return to Texas from that trip that we knew this was the life that was 100% aligned to our values and that would allow us to relentlessly pursue the recently rediscovered dreams that we had tucked away for so many years. We knew, without a doubt, this was it. This was exactly what God was calling to do and exactly where He was calling us to go.

God led us straight to the home and the street and the town. And in that town was…

Smoky Mountain High School.

Since moving here, and contrary to how Lucia might have called it back in June 2018, Isabela did graduate from Smoky Mountain High School last June, and Olivia is a sophomore and varsity cheerleader there now. So, for the past 15 months, we, as a family, have sat in that stadium cheering Olivia on as she cheered on those Smoky Mountain Mustangs.

At one of the final home football games this past fall, Lucia got to cheer on the sidelines with the varsity cheerleaders. And I couldn’t fight back the tears that filled my eyes when I realized that, unbeknownst to either of us back in 2018, we were manifesting the life we KNEW God was calling us to. And for the next 2.5 years, we continued to speak that life into existence. I may have thought “Smoky Mountain High School” was an innocent inside joke between me and my 6-year-old daughter at the time, but we were dreaming aloud, and He knew what was written on our hearts.

So dream. Dream big and say that dream out loud. Search your heart, listen to what it’s saying, then speak those words into existence. And then manifest those words into a belief—who knows, He just might prove to you that it isn’t as fictitious as you once believed.