Sunday, February 22, 2015

Keeping the faith.

I’ve recently been preparing myself for some big changes in life. My husband will be graduating law school in May and trying to decide our next step has been all but consuming our minds for the last several months. After spending the majority of the school year without any job offers, we had decided to take fate into our own hands: come July we would pack up and move back to Tennessee. More specifically, Chattanooga, Tennessee, a place where neither of us had lived before but that promised the lifestyle we craved. We spent about a month mentally preparing ourselves for moving to a new town, with not a ton of money and no job prospects for either of us. Psyching ourselves up with this crazy-adventurous-move-like attitude that it’ll work out because it did for Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love type thing (yeah I know, not at all the same). However, like a typical storyline, life (and God) had other plans.

Have you ever had times where you were waiting on God to “take care” of something? Praying for a situation to work out, for some sort of sign to point you in the right direction. For us, we literally were wanting to be pointed in a direction: stay where we are and somewhat settle, or go chasing after our dreams in the good ole South? I feel like sometimes if God isn’t answering us when or how we want him to, then we bend the reality to make it fit into a different plan, our plan, not His. That’s kinda what I was doing…I was covering up our scared, hopeless thoughts with brave, adventurous ones. Not really a bad idea, but something that is truly hard to invest in 100%.  My thoughts were if life isn’t working out where we are, then we should move to where we want to be. Basically, if we don’t create our own opportunities by moving where we want to be, then nothing would happen. Obviously, God wants us to move because nothing is happening here. Right? Wrong.

A few weeks after we made our final decision to move, after we had looked at houses to rent, and after I had warned my patients that I wouldn’t be here in 6 months (yeah people get attached to their hygienists), we got a phone call. A phone call that Taylor had written off months before, but it was an offer for his dream job position as a federal law clerk in Indianapolis. It took us about 30 seconds to accept the offer and just like that, our shiny, brave adventure was thrown out the window.  

So of course after that, my thinking shifted, my faith shifted, probably back to where it was suppose to be. I learned, once again, that I have no clue what God’s agenda is for me, so I need to stop trying to obsessively plan for it. I shouldn’t have to convince myself that what I’m doing is God’s plan. I learned that I need to be patient. If something isn’t working out the way I want it to, at the rate I want it to, I need to chill out. Faith is my favorite idea in this world, and I believe it can keep all of us sane.

As a result of Taylor’s job offer, we get to stay in Indiana for at least two more years. A place that we are starting to feel more comfortable calling home. I get to stay at a wonderful office that I absolutely love working at with co-workers that I can also call my friends. But maybe best of all, we found a dreamy log home that we get to move into this summer and create lifelong memories in. A different adventure in its own right. 

So I guess my point is, things work out, and usually in ways we don’t expect. Keep the faith, friends.