Holding the Vision for Eternal Aerial Arts, Loosening My Grip on the Mission of Our Studio

The Trail Kept Moving

Here's what that's actually looked like:

• a friend's gym, no air conditioning, a few days a week — because someone else obeyed a nudge to ask me a question.
• an air conditioned gym closer to home, teaching in their open slots — until a local aerial studio closed its doors, and my classes filled almost overnight with incoming youth students and some adults who needed somewhere to land. That's when I knew I needed my own space.
• my first self-leased space — higher ceilings, more room, and finally the ability to set my own optimal class times instead of working around someone else's schedule. But in a year and a half another local studio closed, we started doing competitive aerial and the studio was now too small to meet our needs.
• our current 3,000 square foot space, with 18-foot ceilings and three class spaces instead of the single room we'd had before — because the demand for adult classes had grown, our kids classes had filled up in the old space, and the ceiling height in the last space wasn't high enough for our competition team training needs to put them on national and international podiums.
• And now, a year later, three simultaneous classes some evenings, a ceiling that's again too low for where our athletes are headed, and students preparing to defend rankings this year that we never expected to earn last year.

Not one of those moves was in my original plan. I didn't sit down in that first year and map out a five-year expansion strategy ending in a purpose-built facility. If I had, I probably would have planned smaller, slower, and safer than what actually happened — and I would have missed most of it.

Letting Go Wasn't Just About Buildings

Here's the part I didn't expect when I started praying about turning a hobby into "something more": the letting go wouldn't stop at square footage.

Before there was a studio, there was homeschooling. My oldest was diagnosed with high-functioning autism when he was 5 years-old, and that diagnosis is what put our family on the homeschool path in the first place. We just kept following where that led — homeschooling our other two kids as well, all three of them, all the way through graduation. Nineteen-plus years.

When that season was coming to an end, I didn't just stop. I turned everything I'd learned into a nonprofit, and for seven years I served as its founder and CEO — training parents how to teach and homeschool kids with learning challenges of their own, speaking on the homeschooling circuit, and hosting a podcast that Salem Media picked up and carried. That podcast, Empowering Homeschool Conversations, is actually still up right now, still getting listens, even though I haven't recorded a new episode in over a year and haven't spoken on that circuit in just as long.

I share all of that because this past year, the same month we moved into our fourth and current location, I donated that nonprofit. I closed the door on seven years of work I had built and led, work that mattered and still matters to the families it served.

That wasn't an easy decision. But here's what I've come to see clearly since: none of those nineteen-plus years of homeschooling, none of that nonprofit experience, none of those parent-training relationships or that podcast reach were wasted. They were preparation — for a next step I couldn't have seen coming and honestly didn't go looking for. It's part of why my community trusts that I can take this next step, with God's help: they've watched Him use one calling to build the foundation for the next one, even when I couldn't see the connection while I was living it.

Vision doesn't just reshape our buildings. Sometimes it asks us to close the door on something good we built with our own hands, so both hands are free for what's next.

What Stayed the Same Through All of It

If the space, the class sizes, the ceiling heights, and the competition schedule have all changed, what hasn't?

• Our performance team's music is Christian, on purpose, every time.
• Devotionals and prayer are still central to how we train our youth teams — not an add-on, the foundation.
• Our adult students know we're not just there to correct their form. We're there to listen. To pray for what's actually going on in their lives. To care about the person, not just the athlete.
• When we're at competitions with other studios, we look for ways to love on them — not compete against them in spirit, just in skill.
• And we keep showing our community, one class at a time, that aerial can be a stunning art form and a demanding sport without degrading the human body — that it can actually be an act of worship.

That's the vision holding steady while the mission keeps stretching around it. The building changed four times. The Kingdom impact only grew in the direction it was pointed.

Why This Is Actually Hard

I want to be honest about something: growth that you didn't plan is still scary, even when you can look back and see God's hand in every single step.

Aerial is on the edge of becoming a recognized sport, possibly an Olympic one. Our training has intensified because our students' talent and drive have grown past what I imagined when I was praying about a few classes at my friend's gym. Parents are now asking about academic classes to pair with their kids' training schedules. And I'm sitting here praying about a microschool and a new space, and it is scary, because I have never once seen this mission grow to where it is now — which means I genuinely don't know where it's headed next.

That's the tension of holding a vision firmly and a mission loosely. The vision gives you the confidence to keep saying yes to doors you didn't plan to walk through. The loose grip on the mission is what lets you actually walk through them instead of standing at the threshold trying to force the door to look like the one you originally pictured.

Scripture doesn't tell us to abandon planning — Proverbs is full of counsel about wisdom, counsel, and diligence. But it also tells us plainly whose plans actually stand:

"In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps." — Proverbs 16:9

I plan my course all the time. I have to — you can't run a studio, a performance team , a competition team, or lead a team of teachers without planning. But every single expansion in this studio's history has been the Lord adjusting my steps mid-course, usually through a need I didn't create and couldn't have predicted: a friend's question, a closing studio, a full class roster, a ceiling too short for the next skill level.

There's another verse that's been sitting with me lately, one about writing the vision down and waiting for it, because it will come at its appointed time and not a moment before:

"Write down the revelation and make it plain... For the revelation awaits an appointed time... though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay." — Habakkuk 2:2-3

I wrote down my vision years ago: Kingdom impact through the aerial arts. I didn't write down a floor plan. I'm glad I didn't, because the appointed time for each expansion showed up on its own schedule — a schedule I never would have chosen and could never have guessed.

Where That Leaves Me Now

So here I am again, praying about a microschool, looking at a new space, feeling the same mix of excitement and fear I felt the first time my friend asked me to pray about something bigger than a hobby.

I don't have an answer yet. I'm not going to pretend I do. What I know is that the vision hasn't moved, and it's not going to. What the mission looks like next year is genuinely an open question — one I'm sitting with, praying over, and trying to hold with an open hand instead of a clenched fist.

If you're in a season where your own plans keep getting rerouted, where the "mission" you started with looks nothing like where you are now — I'd encourage you to check: has your vision actually changed, or just the trail getting you there? Sometimes the growth that scares us most is the growth we prayed for and just didn't recognize when it finally showed up.

With love, faith, and excitement, Peggy Ployhar Owner, Eternal Aerial Arts