Welcome to The Gentle Haven
Welcome to The Gentle Haven — a place where faith, family, and homemaking come together. In this first post, I’m sharing a little about who I am, our journey to country living, and the heart behind this space. My hope is to encourage you to create a peaceful, Christ-centered home filled with warmth, grace, and purpose.
Laura Pelletier
5/31/20264 min read
How God Led Us to Our Little Acreage
“He kept it,” I thought as I opened boxes and put things away in our new home.
Nestled inside one of the boxes was a small box filled with colorful scraps of paper. While my husband Nate and I were dating, I had made him a Valentine’s gift that was color-coded. Each color paper held something different — date ideas, my favorite things, hopes for the future, and reasons why I loved him.
He had kept the box, and it had even made the journey with us to our new home.
Curious, I opened it and began reading through a few of the slips of paper. I was dumbfounded by one of the things I had written:
“Someday I want to live in the country outside of a small town, but within driving distance of a bigger town.”
In the middle of all the emotions that came with moving, God gently reminded me that He was blessing me with something I had dreamed about long before Nate and I were even married.
A Peaceful Blessing in the Middle of Change
The journey to our little acreage and this new season of life has brought many changes.
Now that we are approaching the one-year mark of living in our home, I can look back with a little more perspective and see that this acreage was truly a peaceful blessing in the middle of a storm.
Within a single year, we experienced a lot of change:
Welcomed our first baby
Changed jobs
Moved away from home
Unexpectedly lost my father
Yet even in the middle of grief, uncertainty, and change, God has remained so good to us. One of the clearest reminders of that goodness has been this peaceful little sanctuary in the country.
When Life Changed Quickly
In October of 2024, our first child was born, and before our sweet little girl was even a month old, my husband and I began talking about him stepping into pastoral ministry again. Before we met, he had served as a youth pastor in another state, and ministry had always remained close to his heart.
At the time, we imagined the timeline would be a year or two down the road. But after a conversation Nate had at work, everything seemed to move much more quickly than we expected.
From January to June, life became a whirlwind:
January of 2025: Nate began looking for a pastoral position.
The Call: Nate was called to pastor a church an hour and a half away.
The Transition: We listed and sold our home — the house that had once belonged to my grandparents and that I had purchased while I was still single — bought a new home, and moved all of our belongings to our little acreage in the country.
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe how quickly everything changed.
Searching for a Home
Searching for a home over an hour away with a child whose sworn enemy was her car seat presented some significant challenges.
In total, we made four trips to look at homes, and on two of the first three trips, we made offers that were ultimately rejected in favor of another buyer. One of our biggest hopes was to find a home with some land, but with such a limited selection of homes available, we slowly began to think that dream might not happen for us.
Then, on our fourth trip, we saw a home that had been listed that very day — five acres nestled out in the quiet countryside.
Ironically, our home ended up being just as competitive. The day it was listed, three different families toured it, and there were three offers made. By God’s grace, our offer was accepted.
And now, we get to call this peaceful little place home.
Creating a Christ-Centered Home
Our home isn’t perfect, and we significantly downsized in square footage, but in so many ways, we gained far more by moving to the quiet countryside and this little slice of peacefulness we now get to call home.
I look forward to slowly transforming our home and land into something cozy and country-worthy, but more importantly, I want every aspect of our home — aesthetics included — to be Christ-centered, because He is the giver of true peace.
Looking back now, I can see God’s kindness written all over this season,
even in the hard parts.
And I’m so grateful we get to call this peaceful little place home.
