An Unwanted Journey

Life moves along at a steady pace and after days and weeks and months and years of a certain pattern, I got lulled into thinking the pattern of our days would continue on the same way.

What a rude awakening I had when that rhythm was interrupted. Not by some disaster, nor anything traumatic. It was a simple decision by my husband to stop paying our mortgage in January of last year. Quietly done, yet after a few months irreversible, and the constant phone calls were a very noisy reminder of that decision. My name was on our mortgage, yet this was done against my wishes and I had no choice in how things would proceed.

Six months later, my husband announced that since we would be losing our home, he had decided to go ahead and retire from work at the end of the year. He is many years older than I am and I knew of his desire to stop working, but I had always hoped he would wait until retirement age, 65, when our children, or at least our middle two, were graduated from our homeschool. Instead, he would retire with a 17, 16, and 13 year old still home to school and support. Again, I had no voice in this decision.

The final blow came when I was warned that with our home being foreclosed on and his retirement approaching, I ought to prepare myself for a move back to our home town at the beginning of next year, 2012. No asking how I felt or what I thought.

To be fair, I must say that this was always our plan. We had moved here for his job, a move that I did not want to make then - leaving home, family, and everything I had ever known - to move to a strange place where I knew no one. And yet in so many ways this became home. Our daughter was born here. We made wonderful, lifelong homeschool friends here. Our children grew up here, with all of their memories of home based here, in this place that I didn't want to come. And finally, in our eleventh year here, we found a church, a body of believers to join. With love, fellowship, encouragement, and a beautiful Christian example they became our family. And now what had once been part of the plan was something unwanted. Something disrupting. Something to be dreaded.

My only real choice was: would I live out my faith in Christ as Savior and Ruler of all, or would I give in to the sadness, anger, and bitterness that seemed so natural.