Curt:

I grew up on a Mennonite farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where mornings started before sunrise and cows needed milking three times a day regardless of weekends, holidays, or any other plans you might have had. By age five, I was hauling buckets of milk replacer to the calf hutches. By fourteen, I was doing the milking myself.

This sounds romantic until you remember that cows don't care about your schedule. They never have. They never will.

My parents believed ten grades of education was sufficient for a good life, and college was actively discouraged. When I mentioned wanting to become a doctor, they smiled the way you smile at a child who says he wants to be an astronaut-firefighter. "That's not what we do," they'd say, and the conversation would end there.

So I taught myself computers instead. At eighteen, I left the farm for IT work, and over the next sixteen years I went from fixing machines to leading automation projects for a global company. I was good at it. By any reasonable measure, I had built a successful career. But something never fit. It felt like wearing someone else's shoes, functional, certainly, but wrong in ways I couldn't quite explain.

A year into my IT career, when I was nineteen, I received a call at work that changed everything. Someone had found my dad lying unresponsive in the chicken house. I drove home faster than I've driven almost any time since, except maybe when Emily was in labor with our breech twins.

The day before, my parents had returned from a rare vacation to Florida together. That morning, I'd had breakfast with them before heading to work. After I left, my father went to the chicken house to figure out why we were having water pressure problems on the farm. He tried to add air to the pressure tank, not realizing the back of it was rusted and defective.

The tank exploded. He was killed instantly.

The loss was devastating and completely unexpected. It left us in shock for months.

Emily:

I also grew up on a farm, in Denver, Pennsylvania, same community, same values, different livestock.

My first business venture was guinea pigs. And I don't mean I had a few guinea pigs. I mean I had several hundred guinea pigs. What started as a childhood hobby became an actual enterprise, complete with breeding schedules, sales records, and reinvestment strategies. I eventually made enough money to buy my own dogs and start breeding puppies, building a kennel with my dad.

At age five, I lived in Guatemala with my parents at a Mennonite mission for three months.

Then in 1997, we moved to the Bahamas for a year, and again in 1999 for two more years.

Service was just part of how we lived, not something you talked about, just something you did.

My mom was a nurse. My uncle was a doctor. Becoming a nurse felt less like a decision and more like stepping into something that had been waiting for me.

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Curt:

I was friends with Emily's brother and would come over to their house to hang out. At first, I didn't really notice Emily. This was an oversight.

One evening after a church service, I stopped by and Emily had made some sort of decadent pastry served with ice cream for everyone. On my way upstairs, I spotted a spider on the stairway wall. A single spider, minding its own business.

I said nothing. This, I learned later, was a mistake.

Emily had noticed me noticing the spider. She spent the rest of the evening convinced I thought her family lived in squalor, that I was silently judging her housekeeping, that any romantic potential had been destroyed by one arachnid.

For the record: one spider does not constitute squalor. I grew up on a dairy farm. Our house had things that would make a spider file a complaint.

Emily:

The spider incident was not my finest hour.

Here was this guy, dark hair, worked with computers, different from everyone else I knew, and I was completely, embarrassingly interested in him. I'd been noticing him for weeks. And now there's a spider. On the wall. In plain view.

I considered several options: pretending I hadn't seen it, claiming it was a pet, or simply moving to another state.

Instead, I did nothing and hoped he'd forget about it.

He did not forget about it. He's mentioning it in a coffee company's origin story, fifteen years later.

Curt:

A few weeks after the spider incident, a group of us were heading to Vermont for a friend's wedding. We met at Emily's house to carpool, and when I arrived, she came outside to say hi.

She fairly glowed. And all of a sudden, without warning, I realized she was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. I kicked myself for not noticing it sooner. She was friendly and genuine and clearly had her life together in ways I did not.

I knew I was in trouble.

Later, she got me a birthday cake, even though I hadn't mentioned my birthday to anyone.

She had her brother carry it out and start singing so it wouldn't seem like she'd made a big deal.

It was a big deal.

Emily:

The Dairy Queen birthday cake strategy was carefully calculated to appear uncalculated.

I'm not sure it worked.

We got married on June 16, 2007.

Then, because nothing in our lives happens simply, we got stranded on the way home from our honeymoon. We landed in Philadelphia to find there were no rental cars available anywhere, not at the airport, not in the city, not within any reasonable distance. We ended up in a taxi for the entire drive back to Lititz, over an hour of winding Pennsylvania roads, while our driver provided colorful commentary on the route, the distance, and his general dissatisfaction with both.

Welcome to married life.

Curt:

After we got married, I kept working in IT while Emily went to LPN school and became a nurse, following her mom into the profession. She had plans to continue to her RN. Life, as it turned out, had different plans.

Our first son, Shawn, arrived in May 2010, seven weeks early. I sat in that hospital working remotely on my laptop, but I kept watching the medical team, the monitors, the careful attention, the quiet competence of people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Something shifted in me during those days. Medicine wasn't just a childhood dream I'd buried under a decade of IT work. It was still there, waiting, tapping its foot impatiently.

Emily:

While we were dating, I went through CNA training because I knew I wanted to be in healthcare. What I didn't know was that I'd spend the next fifteen years watching my husband go through healthcare training while I held down the actual household.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After Shawn came loss, five miscarriages, each one a grief we carried without talking about it much. I remember one in particular: we'd driven to Niagara Falls for a weekend getaway, a chance to breathe, and my phone rang. The doctor. Another miscarriage. I started crying, and Curt didn't say anything. In that moment, his silence felt like blame. Like maybe he thought it was my fault. I know now that wasn't true. He was angry at the situation, at the unfairness of it happening on a weekend that was supposed to be relaxing. But he didn't know how to say that, and I didn't know how to ask.

We grieved differently. We grieved alone. It's one of the hardest things about marriage: you can love someone completely and still feel invisible to them in your worst moments.

Then Brandt arrived. Normal delivery. No NICU. This felt like mercy.

Curt:

Somewhere in there, two kids, grief we didn't discuss much, a job that paid the bills but didn't fill the void, I brought up an idea over a date-night dinner at Longhorn Steakhouse.

Medical school.

I'd been thinking about it for weeks, adjusting to the idea myself before saying it out loud. I was nearly thirty. I had a family. No pre-med background. Parents who believed tenth grade was sufficient. It sounded impossible even in my own head.

Emily listened. Her face showed skepticism, just for a moment, but she didn't shut it down. She asked hard questions: How would we support the family if I quit my job? How long would it take? Would I be there for the children?

She didn't tell me I was crazy. At least not out loud.

Emily:

I may have thought he was crazy, especially since we had found out we were having twins with a 4-year-old and a 10-month-old.

But I also knew what this dream meant to him. I wasn't going to be the one to say no. If he wanted to try, we'd try together.

Neither of us knew what we were getting into. If we had known all the details, all the moves, all the crises, all the moments of wondering whether we'd made a terrible mistake, we might not have had the courage to proceed. But you don't get to know those things in advance. You just step forward and trust.

Curt:

We decided to give it a trial run: one semester at community college, keep working full-time, see how it goes. You can do anything if you're willing to work hard, right?

We didn't realize we'd just jumped down the rabbit hole.

Emily:

Then came the twins, Lawson and Logan, both premature, both in the NICU. I had an emergency C-section at Heart of Lancaster, and while Lawson stayed there, Logan had to be transferred to Penn State Hershey for respiratory distress.

I remember standing at his bedside before they took him. I hadn't really gotten to see him yet, just a glimpse when they held him up during the C-section. He was so small, five pounds ten ounces, and something was wrong with his heart but they didn't know what. I reached out to touch him, crying, terrified of what might happen.

I didn't say anything to him. I just touched him and watched them take him away.

Then for days we drove between hospitals, Lawson at Lancaster, Logan at Hershey, me still recovering from surgery, because I couldn't stand not seeing both of them.

Curt:

I helped keep things running at home while Emily healed and we traveled between NICUs. In between, I studied chemistry in the NICU beside their isolettes, because the semester wasn't going to wait for our personal crisis.

Emily:

Curt found a medical school in Grenada, St. George's University. Our church had connections there, running a mission school for local children, and suddenly this wild idea had a shape.

The plan: sell our Pennsylvania home of eleven years, pack up four boys, and move to a Caribbean island so Curt could chase a dream that had lived in him since childhood.

We thought we'd go for two years, come back, settle into an area, rotate at a local hospital, and ideally get a residency at the same institution, maybe even a job. That was the plan, anyway. Just 4 years and one move...

I had lived internationally before, Guatemala, the Bahamas. I knew what mission life looked like. But this was different. This time I had four young children and a husband who would be consumed by medical school.

Curt:

Grenada was beautiful and transformative. It was also never boring.

We became foster parents to a little girl who needed a home. We volunteered at the mission. The boys discovered the beach and never wanted to leave. For a while, it felt like maybe this impossible thing might actually work.

Emily kept everyone functioning, including me. Medical school is consuming in ways I hadn't understood, and she made sure I came to the beach sometimes, took breaks after exams, remembered I had a family.

I'm not sure I said that enough at the time.

Emily:

But I won't pretend it was easy.

Many nights after the boys were asleep and Curt was at the university studying, I would go out to the veranda. Our house hung on the side of a mountain, and below me the whole community spread out, the golf course, the hillside dotted with lights, the darkness beyond.

I would sit on the railing and look out at all of it, and tears would just stream down my face.

I missed Pennsylvania. I missed normal. I missed having a husband who came home at night instead of disappearing into textbooks and exams. I loved him. I believed in his dream. But the weight of carrying everything, the children, the household, the fear, the loneliness, was heavier than I'd imagined.

There were weeks when we had maybe ten dollars in the account and I didn't know how we were going to buy groceries. We ate what we had in the cupboards. Casseroles with whatever was there. Skipped vegetables. Sometimes unexpected money would show up and we'd buy the bare minimum until the next paycheck.

Curt never knew about the veranda nights. I didn't tell him. I felt like he didn't fully understand the sacrifice I was making, and I didn't know how to explain it without sounding like I was asking him to give up or make his load heavier.

So I cried alone, wiped my face, and went back inside to do the next thing that needed doing.

Curt:

Meanwhile, the island tested our survival instincts on a regular basis. The first summer we were on the island, we got scary news. My mother was diagnosed with cancer, multiple myeloma. At the same time, I was on the island dealing with "imposter syndrome" and struggling with my second term in medical school. The university had a standard procedure where they would recommend you repeat the term if your grades dropped below a certain threshold. Getting into the groove of medical school and the new diagnosis of my mom's cancer, we decided to utilize their "credit remediation" option and to repeat my second term so we could travel back to Pennsylvania and spend time with family.

Emily:

One day I was cleaning on the second floor of the church building when I heard screaming. I ran to the veranda and looked down.

Our minivan was rolling backward down the hill. The doors were open. The twins were inside.

I didn't hear anything after that, no sounds, no voices. I just saw the van rolling and knew my children were in it.

I flew down the steps, through the gate, around the building. The doors had caught on a post and bent backward. The van kept going until it climbed a road bank and finally stopped.

Everyone was fine. The van was fixable. I stood there for a moment, heart pounding, reconsidering my life choices.

Curt:

Our house hung on the side of a mountain, gorgeous view of the ocean, but not exactly child-proofed. The veranda dropped off eight feet on one side. Laundry hung over the railing.

One day, the twins were playing hide-and-seek. Logan hid behind the laundry. Lawson, looking for him, shoved it aside, not realizing his brother was behind it.

Logan went over the edge, landed on the ground right beside a drainage pipe, and walked away without a scratch.

Grenada had limited healthcare. If he'd been seriously hurt, I don't know what we would have done. We learned to pray with increased frequency and specificity.

Shawn climbed a palm tree leaning out over the ocean. We told him to hang on for a photo-op.

He didn't.

Fell thirteen feet. Landed flat on his back on the sand.

"I broke my back!" he cried the whole way home.

He was fine. We were not.

Emily:

We spent many evenings on campus as a family. Scooters, basketball, and rock climbing kept us busy till bedtime, after a quick supper with Curt.

My sanity during these two years was the SO (Significant Other organization). Women who were in the same exact shoes as me and totally got it. We did so many things together, and I made friends for life.

Curt:

Then COVID arrived.

The university closed with two days' notice. We had to evacuate immediately.

Our foster daughter, a little girl who had become part of our family in ways that made it feel like she'd always been there, couldn't come with us. Another family from our church took her in, people we trusted completely.

But saying goodbye to a child with forty-eight hours' notice is not something you recover from quickly.

Emily:

The thing is, I didn't know it was really goodbye. I thought we were coming back. I thought it was temporary, a quick evacuation, and then life would return to normal. So I didn't grieve properly in the moment. I told her we'd see her soon.

By the time I realized we weren't going back, we were in the States dealing with a whole new set of crises. The grief got buried under survival.

It's still there, somewhere, unfinished.

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Emily:

We landed back in the States with no home lined up.

A friend let us stay in her house in downtown Philadelphia while we figured out what came next. We found temporary housing in Pennsylvania, a nice house someone let us use with no promises about duration. Curt finished classes over Zoom.

I started working as a nurse in between homeschooling to pay the bills. We thought we might finally catch our breath.

Curt:

We didn't.

While completing coursework virtually, I had to take a proctored exam under video monitoring. I spent hours preparing the room, a home office in the house we were borrowing. Camera placement checked. Desk cleared. Door closed. Every requirement met meticulously.

Two weeks later, I received an email. I had been accused of an exam violation.

I was devastated. I had done everything right. I immediately went into problem-solving mode, contacted exam services, the department head, the Dean's office. I was met with inflexibility. No one would listen.

My course grade was reduced significantly. There was a real possibility I would fail the entire term. After everything we had sacrificed, selling our home, moving to Grenada, the evacuation, living in borrowed housing, it could all end because of an accusation I couldn't fight.

There were moments when the pressure felt unbearable, when I needed to get centered before an exam. I would find a quiet place where Emily and the boys couldn't see me. I would sit, and tears would stream down my face, and I would pray.

Usually silent. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes all I could say was: "Dear God, please help. Please help."

I would tell Him I knew He could do anything. That we were completely helpless without Him. That I had no idea how we were going to make it.

Emily:

I watched my husband break in ways I had never seen.

He had worked so hard. Sacrificed so much. Asked so much of all of us. And now something completely outside his control threatened to end everything.

There were times I found him crying and just wiped away his tears without saying anything. There was nothing to say. All I could do was hold him and pray with him and believe that somehow God would make a way.

Curt:

When the semester ended, the administration reduced the penalty. Just enough to let me pass.

Just enough.

We both wept. It wasn't the vindication I'd hoped for, no apology, no acknowledgment that I'd done nothing wrong. But it was enough grace to keep going. Enough mercy to continue the journey.

Emily:

Three months later, the house we were staying in sold. We moved to Virginia, near my sister. I found a job at Mountain View Nursing Home. It was what we needed to pay the rent, but not much else. I would visit the local food bank, hoping no one would recognize me.

In January 2021, we headed to Jacksonville, FL, for eight weeks of Step One prep. We had a beautiful condo by the water. Curt was always gone. I explored Jacksonville with four boys in tow and pregnant. 8 weeks turned to 10 weeks, but he took the exam before we headed home.

One night when I was at work, Curt called me, "We're moving to Detroit," he said. That's where the university had assigned us for his hospital clinical rotations. We had one month to find a house, pack up, and move.

Curt:

Cade arrived at 31 weeks, the day before we were supposed to leave for Michigan for my clinical rotations. I called the coordinator from the NICU and explained the situation. She was understanding in a way I hadn't expected, and they postponed my start date by six weeks so we could wait for Cade to graduate from the NICU at UVA in Charlottesville.

Another answer to prayer, arriving exactly when we needed it...again.

Emily:

Two weeks after he was discharged, we loaded up and drove to Michigan.

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Emily:

Cade was still too small for a regular car seat, so he made the trip to Michigan in a car bed that the NICU doctors arranged for. Four boys, one newborn lying flat, and whatever sanity we had left.

Four weeks postpartum, I was outside with a shovel, digging out tree stumps from our overgrown property. The whole side of our yard was wild rose bushes and brush. Our neighbor thought we should get HOA approval before making changes.

I had a shovel, a newborn, and no patience for committees.

We cleared it ourselves.

Curt:

I helped with a chainsaw.

There was a small black walnut tree leaning toward the road. I had a plan: tie a rope around it, connect it to my truck to pull it the right direction, and start cutting. The tree was carefully notched. Like a real pro, I thought.

The rope wasn't long enough, so I'd knotted two sections together. Square knots aren't supposed to fail, right?

At the crucial moment, the knot failed.

The tree crashed across a four-lane road. Walnuts everywhere. The chainsaw was out of gas. I was flagging down traffic, scrambling to cut the tree off the pavement while Emily helped drag branches to the shoulder.

Our neighbors discussed this incident for months. Fortunately, Mr. HOA was out of town when it happened.

Emily:

We also built a barn that year.

It started as a Costco kit that sat in our driveway for a year because we couldn't afford a contractor for the foundation. Eventually Curt got tired of looking at it, grabbed a shovel, rented a trailer, hauled gravel, and we built the whole thing ourselves. Trusses. Doors. Shingles. Everything.

Our neighbor Fred, Mr. HOA himself, came over when we finished, looked at it, looked at our boys, and said: "Your dad is like Jesus himself. A real carpenter."

We all burst out laughing. But deep down, it meant something. We'd had tension with him about property changes, and to hear him appreciate what we'd built, in a season when Curt felt like a failure at everything else, that small compliment carried more weight than he knew.

Curt:

Detroit was clinical rotations. Twelve-hour shifts. Studying every night. Exams that determined everything.

I was absent more than I was present. I knew Emily was carrying the family alone, and I carried guilt about that even as I pushed forward. But I didn't know how to do it differently. I was in survival mode, tunnel vision, trying to make it through each day.

Emily:

I tried to hold the household together. Got the boys to school one year and homeschooled the following year when our tuition doubled with the twins starting first grade. Managed the chaos. Took nursing shifts to help with finances.

There were difficult nights, nights when five kids needed five different things and I handled all of them alone, nights when I wondered how much longer I could keep going.

But we weren't completely alone. We found two young families who were starting a church, and we began having Bible studies. Neighbors became friends became family.

Detroit was hard. But it taught us that difficult things become more bearable when you have people around you.

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Curt:

My mom succumbed to her cancer. We knew she was sick. We drove from Michigan to see her a few weeks before she passed, made sure she got to hold our baby, made sure each of the boys gave her a hug. During her final moments, my brothers gathered around her bed in Pennsylvania. We were still in Michigan, I was studying, Emily was working, the boys were in school.

They called us so we could say goodbye.

I gathered the boys around the phone. Shawn was twelve, Brandt was nine, the twins were eight. I asked them to sing to her. They sang "Abide With Me."

They didn't cry. They understood what was happening. They're sensitive, caring kids, and they sang tenderly, knowing it mattered. My mother couldn't respond, but she heard them. I have to believe she heard them.

We didn't make it back before she passed.

Shortly after, I attempted the board exam I needed to pass to move forward.

I didn't pass by 1 point.

We were in Michigan with no job, no clear path, no idea what to do next. I'd spent years building toward something, years of Emily's sacrifice, years of believing this was what God had called me to, and suddenly the road just ended.

I felt like a failure. I had asked so much of my family. Emily had given up everything. The boys had been dragged across states, across countries. And now I couldn't deliver.

I didn't know what to do except study more. I bought expensive prep materials that promised success, but I could tell it wasn't working. My mental state, my stress, was hindering everything. There were moments of apprehension, and although I might not have admitted it then, hopelessness.

Several weeks passed. I kept trying. I kept failing to make progress.

Emily:

One morning before I left for work, I had a feeling. I don't know how else to describe it.

"Why don't you make a phone call," I said, "and see if Dr. Smith knows of anything else we can try."

Curt:

That evening, I made the call to a colleague from St. George's, someone I'd stayed in touch with, who'd given me advice when I was applying for residency. I didn't have a specific reason for calling. I just needed to talk to someone.

That exact day, that very day, he had been planning to post a research fellowship position.

"I think I may have a job that interests you," he said.

I felt my face light up. A ray of hope I hadn't felt in weeks.

Within thirty days, we sold our house in Michigan, purchased a place in Louisiana, and were on the road to Shreveport.

Emily:

Who lives in Louisiana? I had never been there, but it was an answer. We had no plan. We had no backup. We just had this phone call that came at exactly the right moment.

I don't know what you call that. We call it an answer to prayer.

Emily:

Shreveport gave us five acres and a schedule that should not have been possible. Curt worked full-time days at his research fellowship. I worked PRN at a nursing and rehab facility in Bossier City, picking up several shifts a week, and traveled for insurance health screenings with Quest Diagnostics when contracts came up.

And we shared a pharmacy delivery route. Every evening, one of us walked out the door about ten minutes after Curt got home from his day job and drove until one in the morning. Whoever stayed behind handled supper, homework, and bedtime for the boys alone. There were weeks we barely saw each other.

Curt also donated plasma, as many times a week as they would allow. When we say we did whatever it took, we mean it fairly literally.

I joked that we were addicted to chaos, but in reality we were just making it work.

Curt:

In 2024, we traveled to Greenville, South Carolina as a family. I was presenting at a Christian Ophthalmology Society conference, and the kids were on summer break. We planned it as a rare family vacation wrapped around the conference. Emily was pregnant with our sixth, and the pregnancy had been uncomplicated up to that point.

The night we arrived, at two in the morning, Emily woke up with severe preeclampsia. We Googled the nearest hospital, woke up the kids, and drove.

What happened next still amazes us.

When the conference found out why I wasn't there to present, they lifted an offering, a generous sum. They prayed for us, not just that day but every day we were there. The director of the conference came to visit us in the hospital. Local churches provided us with an apartment large enough for the whole family, along with food, beds, and even toys for the boys. A local ophthalmology clinic started a meal train, so much food we couldn't accept it all. Emily's second cousin, who we'd overlapped with in Grenada and now lives about an hour and a half south of Greenville, heard what happened and drove up with a minivan full of food from their congregation.

Once again, people showed up at exactly the right moment.

Emily:

Jace arrived early. Our fifth premature baby. Our fifth NICU journey. In a state where we knew no one.

My sister kindly drove through the night, and the boys only sat in the waiting room for six hours. She and my niece carried the brunt of childcare the next two weeks. Miracles happened every single day.

But the real miracle was what came next. Curt's attending physician in Louisiana, who also happened to be the state's deputy surgeon general, worked with Medicaid to arrange a medical flight to bring Jace back to the NICU in Shreveport.

The kids only missed one week of school. We were home. We were together.

Curt:

Jace was discharged. We brought him home in the morning and had a good couple of hours with him. The boys all got a turn to hold him.

Around eleven o'clock, Emily was changing his diaper. She saw blood.

She called me over. We started going through possibilities, an allergy, constipation, something minor. But deep down, I think we both knew. He'd been fine in the NICU. He'd only been home eight hours.

We left a note on the table for the boys, "We took Jace to the ER," in case Shawn woke up.

We bundled him up and drove to the hospital, having called ahead to notify the NICU.

The emergency room was full of people coughing, obviously sick. We sat there terrified he would pick something up. After about half an hour, I got on my phone and called the NICU staff directly. I also went to the ER desk. I didn't raise my voice. I just said: "We need to have him seen now."

Two nurses came down from the NICU, looked at the pictures of his diapers on our phones, and immediately took him back. They readmitted him right away.

After they took him upstairs, Emily and I stood in the hallway and cried.

I said: "He was ours for a couple hours."

NEC - necrotizing enterocolitis. We both knew it carries a high mortality rate in premature infants. For ten days, Jace was back in the NICU. Three big gun IV antibiotics. NPO for a week - no food, just IV fluids - while we waited to see if his intestines would heal on their own or if he'd need emergency surgery.

He didn't need surgery. He came home. He's fine now, and he has since made it very clear that he's perfectly fine and would like everyone to stop making a fuss about it.

Emily:

This is how it's been the whole way through. Crisis after crisis. And people showing up when we needed them. Provision arriving at the last possible moment.

We're tired. We're grateful. We're still standing.

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Curt:

Match Day, this time, was deliberately boring.

For the uninitiated: after medical school comes residency, years of training in a hospital you don't get to choose. You interview, you rank your hopes, and a national computer algorithm decides. Match Day is the day it tells you your family's future.

We had been through enough dramatic reveals for one lifetime. No restaurant. No party. No cameras pointed at faces that might not cooperate. When the email came, I opened it and told Emily: "We matched."

Then the system made us wait. Monday tells you that you matched. Friday tells you where. For four days, we knew only that we were moving somewhere between Pennsylvania and North Dakota, with Michigan, Mississippi, and New Orleans all in the running.

Friday's answer: Michigan. Rural family medicine. A year in Flint, then two years up north in Petoskey.

In some ways, it felt like going home. We knew the state. We knew we were headed to a good program with good people and good training. But it also meant one thing for certain: we were moving again. Suddenly there were a million things to do. Unfinished renovation projects to complete. A house to list. Six boys' lives to pack into boxes. Three dogs to get ready for a two-day drive north.

Emily:

The truth is, I didn't feel like we could survive another match cycle. We had been through one that ended in despair, and the unknowns of that unmatched season nearly broke us. Curt and I were both barely surviving emotionally. I didn't think our marriage, our bodies, or our minds could handle it again.

So I prayed. At home with the boys while Curt was at work, when the anxiety started rising, I would turn on loud worship music. When the little ones went down for naps, I would go out to the swing and lie there watching the clouds, pleading with God to make something work out. On the pharmacy route at night, I prayed out loud at the windshield, watching the sunsets, asking Him for a sign that He saw us. That He had a plan.

When Curt opened the email and said we matched, I could hardly believe it. Some quiet part of me had felt all along that we would. But we had been hurt enough times that I was scared to trust that feeling.

Then we matched, and something shifted. I started believing that good things could happen to us again.

I spent that week convinced we were headed to Pennsylvania. Home. My parents are getting older, and I carry a lot of guilt about not being close enough to help them, about depriving them of grandchildren I know they miss. Pennsylvania would have given some of that back. I knew, deep down, it could just as easily be New Orleans or somewhere far down our list, but I let myself hope anyway.

When Friday came and the answer was Michigan, my first reaction was anger. Not at Michigan. At the fact that it wasn't Pennsylvania.

Most of the boys were excited about the adventure. Shawn wasn't. He was sixteen, with the deepest roots, and we watched him cycle through denial and anger and grief on his way to acceptance. Watching your child grieve something you decided is its own kind of hard. The boys were going to have to leave their friends and say goodbye again, because of us. That guilt sat with me the whole spring.

Then came the leaving. The boys had made close friends, especially through their school, and the end of the school year became a long string of lasts. Last events. Last games. Last goodbyes.

Brandt won the science fair, which meant the world to him because science is his thing, and he knew he was leaving. At the final assembly, Shawn was recognized as student of the quarter for the attribute of joy. He wasn't expecting it. Most of the audience was in tears. Here was a kid about to move away from all his friends, being honored for joy.

Curt and I were crying too. Hearing what the teachers and administration said about Shawn, and about our family, made it all real, what we were losing and what the boys were carrying. And underneath the tears, I was insanely proud of them. New kids, rigorous school, move after move, and they didn't just survive it. They excelled.

We arranged a send-off for each of the boys. The twins got a Nerf war with their entire class. Brandt got laser tag and pizza with his classmates. Shawn's friends threw him a birthday party at his best friend's house, cake and all, that doubled as his going-away party. I ran most of it while Curt was home wrapping up everything else, so a lot of the goodbyes landed on me alone.

Packing up the house was hard the way it is always hard. Another season of change. Another round of goodbyes.

But the hardest was my last night at work. Two of my residents, two ladies, were visiting together in one room when I came in to give them their pills and say goodbye. They hugged me and told me they couldn't believe I had to move. That every time they get a good nurse, she ends up leaving. That they didn't know what they would do without me, but they would be praying for me, and things were going to work out for my family.

You spend your shifts taking care of people, and then one night you realize they have been taking care of you too. It made me wish I didn't have to leave.

Curt:

Then there was the house.

Houses do not sell quickly in Shreveport. We listed six weeks before our move date, with an agent who was a fellow parent from the boys' school, and moved out before we even had a contract. The offer, when it finally came, was lower than we hoped. We stayed on pins and needles from offer to closing, mostly because so much of our life had felt out of our control that we had developed a reflex for expecting the worst. Unnecessary, in retrospect. Human, in the moment.

Closing didn't happen until weeks after we had already left, which meant paying rent in Michigan and a mortgage in Louisiana at the same time, without knowing exactly how.

You would think by now we'd recognize the pattern. Need, then provision. It held again.

Emily:

Moving day fell on the hottest weekend of the year. All spring the weather had been perfectly moderate. Then when we needed to load two trucks, the heat index hit triple digits with humidity over eighty percent. Naturally.

We rented a twenty-six foot truck and a sixteen foot truck, plus a car carrier for the minivan. My brother flew down from New Jersey to help load and drive. Before we left, we rushed Shawn through his final driving test so his Louisiana permit wouldn't become a Michigan problem, and he made the trip a licensed driver. The boys all took turns riding up front in the big trucks.

We caravanned north. Six boys, three dogs, one of whom got carsick in the vehicle. No cat. The cat had fallen victim to Louisiana's predator ecosystem somewhere along the way, a fact I mention here so the observant reader stops counting. We met friends for lunch at the halfway point, let the kids burn off energy and the dogs stretch their legs, stayed overnight at a hotel, and pulled into Michigan around noon the next day.

We were seeing our rental house for the very first time as we pulled in. The property managers had told us to arrive later than we wanted to. So we did. Then they weren't there. Which is how we ended up standing on the street outside a locked house with two trucks, six boys, three dogs, and the friends who had come to help us unload.

Was I irritated? Yes. Yes, I was.

But walking through the house that first hour, mostly what I felt was relief. It was nice. Updated. Nothing needed fixing. The kitchen was nice. After years of unfinished projects, a house that needed no work felt like a gift. It felt like ours almost right away.

Curt:

Quiet street, end of the road, nothing behind us, exactly the right size for our family. No neighbors came out to greet us, which we wondered about. But the property managers, once they arrived, couldn't have been more welcoming, and two families from our Detroit years, the ones from the living-room Bible studies, showed up and started carrying boxes.

Cade wasted no time.

Within the first week, he was walking up to anyone he saw outside: "I'm Cade. We just moved from Buncombe Rd in Louisiana." Before we knew a single neighbor's name, every one of them knew Cade's.

Our first Sunday morning at 8 am, we realized he was nowhere to be found. He had rung the doorbell of the older lady who lives alone next door, first thing in the morning: "My name is Cade. Do you want to do something?" She told him sure, but let her wake up, get dressed, and eat some breakfast first. When we went over to apologize, she waved us off. "Don't be ridiculous." She thought he was adorable, vouched for all the neighborhood kids, and told our boys to come play.

The neighborhood children spent about two weeks doing slow drive-bys on their bikes, glancing shyly at our house, working up their courage. Then one family sent their kids down for kickball on the common green, and that was that. Now it's unusual to not see them all out together. Bikes, sidewalk chalk, whiffle ball, football, basketball, sunup to sundown if we'd allow it. The other parents tell us they have to beg their children to play on their iPads now. The little girls come into our backyard and cradle our Bichon puppies in their arms like baby dolls. The puppies have filed no complaints.

Jace, meanwhile, had to be convinced about grass. In Louisiana, grass meant prickers in your feet and fire ants on your ankles. Set him down in a Michigan lawn, and he would lift his feet like he was walking on glass, fussing the whole way. It took three weeks for him to discover that northern grass doesn't bite. Now he runs through it barefoot like he invented it.

We brought our basketball hoop from Louisiana, the kind that needs a cement footing with a sleeve in the ground. Our landlord approved without hesitating. Boys that age, he said, need something to do besides sit in the house all day.

One recent evening, three or four families' worth of kids filled our driveway around that hoop, Emily out there playing with them and catching up on neighborhood news with the other moms. After I took the little ones in for bed, I stood at the window for a minute and watched. After all the moves and all the goodbyes, it looked a lot like the thing we had been praying for.

Emily:

This time we were intentional about settling in. Pictures on the walls, boxes emptied, everything in its place, because I wanted us to be done before Curt started residency and disappeared into the hospital. We only have a year here. I wasn't going to spend it surrounded by boxes.

Watching the boys find friends here makes me glad and sad in the same breath. I know what's coming: another goodbye next summer, another round of guilt that our family can't just settle and be normal. I've decided that's next year's grief. This year, they have friends.

As for how I was really doing those first weeks, I did what I always do. I resigned myself to the changes and kept moving. If you ask me what I was actually feeling, the truthful answer is I don't know. There's a stack of feelings somewhere with my name on it, years high, and someday I'm going to have to sit down and go through it. Not this year.

Shawn wanted a job the week we arrived. He had worked at a greenhouse in Louisiana and loved it, and we could see how good it was for him. Coming home tired is a blessing when the alternative is sitting at home thinking about everything you left behind.

Our landlord mentioned a mower shop down the road in Linden. Since Shawn had his license, we sent him in to ask about servicing our mower, which, after five acres of coarse Louisiana grass, ant mounds, and gopher mounds, needed all the help it could get. He set up the repair, then asked, entirely on his own: "By the way, do you happen to need any help?"

They handed him an application on the spot. He filled it out that same day, they offered him roughly twice what he'd made in Louisiana, and they asked if he could start Saturday. The owners told us later how impressed they were that he walked in and asked for the job himself.

He's been gaining responsibility ever since, and saving for his first car, which we'll split with him. Something safe, all-wheel drive, before the Michigan winter arrives.

Curt:

And BrewBoys came north with us.

One of the first things we discovered about Michigan: farmers markets. Everywhere. More markets and small business events than we found in all our time in Louisiana. We started reaching out immediately.

Our first event was a small business weekend in Flint, built around featuring local businesses and helping them gain momentum in the community. We set up our stand with samples, the new business nobody had heard of. Sales were slow for most of the day, and we quietly wondered whether it was worth our while. By the end of the day, we had made enough sales to answer that question. But the better answer came partway through the afternoon, when the coordinators invited Emily onto the stage and interviewed her, on camera, in front of every vendor and customer there. People were taken with what BrewBoys stands for. They welcomed us to the community and told us we'd be included in future events.

The next weekend, a farmers market in Brighton accepted us. People loved the coffee samples, the reception was warm, and the day was a success.

There are more markets and events around here than we can get to. We're already spreading the word north to Petoskey, because BrewBoys moves when we move. As I work through residency and we learn to know people in each community where we live, the BrewBoys footprint grows too.

Residency itself began with a month of orientation. Training, introductions, firsts. Exhausting, exactly as it should be. You wouldn't want a program that broke you in any other way.

So we begin the next chapter the way we've begun every other one. Emily holding down the household, this time with homeschooling on her plate. Me gone more than I'd like. A move to Petoskey already waiting down the road. No idea how all the logistics will work.

But we've stopped needing to know. The pattern has held this long.

If my half of this chapter reads like logistics while Emily's carries the feelings, it's not because I felt less. Reporting facts is how I survive. It keeps my hands steady enough to do the next thing. Emily mentioned the stack of feelings with her name on it. There's a stack with my name too. She's just braver about opening hers.

Emily:

I never thought we'd be back in Michigan again. But it feels really good to be back.

The people we love in Louisiana, we miss every day. The heat, the fire ants, and the pricker grass, we do not. Michigan gave us back green lawns, shade trees, and air you can breathe in July, and I feel a little guilty for how much I love it.

And for the record, I was never mad at Michigan. Just at not getting Pennsylvania.

Turns out second choices can feel like home too.

Emily:

People sometimes ask how I manage everything. I don't have a good answer for that.

Mostly I just do the next thing. Then the next thing after that. Eventually it's bedtime and everyone's still alive, so that counts as success.

I didn't sign up to be a single parent, but medical training doesn't really consult your schedule. Curt's been in class, clinicals, or research for most of our marriage. I've handled school events, doctor's appointments, homework, discipline, sickness, and the daily chaos of six boys, not because I'm especially capable, but because someone has to, and he's not home.

I went to LPN school planning to become an RN. That's still the plan. It's just been the plan for a while now.

Do I get tired? Obviously. Do I sometimes wonder what I was thinking when we added another thing to our plates? Constantly.

But we committed to this journey together. I'm not going anywhere.

Curt:

Emily would never say this about herself, so I'll say it.

She has no idea how much she holds together. She thinks she's just "doing the next thing," but somehow "the next thing" includes managing six schedules, keeping six boys fed and educated, working nursing shifts, and handling crises I don't even hear about until they're resolved.

There were nights on that veranda in Grenada when she cried alone, looking out at the lights on the hillside, wishing for a normal life. I didn't know. She didn't tell me. She carried that weight in silence so I could carry mine.

She is the reason any of this works. She'd roll her eyes at that sentence, but it's true.

Emily:

I'm rolling my eyes.

But also, this coffee company isn't just Curt's project. It's ours. Another thing on our plates.

We're good at adding things to our plates. It's basically our hobby at this point.

Together:

Coffee has been present for every chapter.

Early morning study sessions. Late nights in the NICU. Long drives between states with sleeping children in the back. Quiet moments of prayer when we didn't know what came next.

It didn't solve anything. But it was there, consistent when nothing else was. A small comfort in seasons of uncertainty.

When we started thinking about building something together, something the whole family could participate in, something that might help us get to the finish line, coffee made sense.

Not because we're experts. Because it's been part of our story from the beginning.

Each BrewBoys blend represents an actual chapter of our lives.

Farmhouse Reserve: Pennsylvania Roots
Steady and grounding. Like mornings on the farm that taught us discipline, faith, and the value of showing up even when no one's watching.

Island Hope: Grenada Chapter
Bright and refreshing. Like Caribbean mornings that reminded us to hold onto hope even when the path was uncertain and the bank account was empty.

Blue Ridge Mist: Virginia Chapter
Smooth and gentle, with a sweetness that reveals itself at the perfect time. Like the season that taught us the mist was not an obstacle. It held its own quiet beauty.

Motor City Grind: Detroit Chapter
Bold and persistent. Like the city that taught us the value of community, that impossible things become bearable when you have people around you.

Bayou Resilience: Louisiana Chapter
Southern warmth with notes of pecan and caramel. For getting through whatever comes next, one cup at a time.

The Veranda: Quiet Chapter
Rich and clean with a finish that invites you to linger. For the unhurried moments: a Pennsylvania backyard, a Grenada beach, a Louisiana porch. Wherever you pause with the people who matter.

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Together:

We didn't start this company just to sell coffee.

Throughout this journey, we've had more moments of staring at a near-empty bank account than we can count. But we've also had more moments of unexpected provision than we can count. Friends who gave us housing when we had nowhere to go. Churches that showed up with meals. Money appearing when we had no idea how we'd make it through the week. Phone calls that came on the exact right day.

That's the pattern. Need and provision. Over and over.

A recent example: on a hard day not long ago, Emily prayed a very specific prayer, that we would sell ten bags of coffee that day. We sold twelve. Take that however you like. We took it as confirmation that He hears us. That He's with us, even now.

Here's the thing: we're not telling you this story from the finish line.

Curt is still in training, with years of residency and at least one more move ahead. We're still figuring out how to make the numbers work some weeks. The journey isn't over.

We're in the middle of it.

People tell us all the time: "We need more Christian doctors. We need more people like you in medicine."

Here's your chance to help make that happen.

When you buy a bag of BrewBoys Coffee, you're not just getting great coffee, you're joining our journey. You're helping a family stay in the fight. You're supporting the very thing you say you want to see more of in the world.

We've received so much. And we're not waiting until circumstances are perfect to give back, because if you wait for perfect circumstances, you never help anyone. We're teaching our boys to look for the people right next to them. Their neighbors. Their friends. The ones they can help today.

As BrewBoys grows, we will continue to give back, supporting others as they pursue causes that seem impossible.

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