Jumbled Up & Facing Forward

The teapot whistled on the stove while I moved around the kitchen throwing dishes into their places and wiping up spills. We get home from work late because of Brandon’s school and work schedule and I always spend the first hour or two doing housework, cooking and packing lunches.

It’s herbal tea for me and Earl Grey for Brandon. He likes the tea sweet and I prefer mine sweet, but not as overpoweringly sweet as my coffee. I drink half the cup and then drip a few hot drops on my leg as I run up the stairs holding a mug in one hand and a computer power cord in the other. My pants will dry, right? Then I get distracted by carrying two loads of laundry upstairs to be dumped unceremoniously onto our bed for folding. The tea is forgotten and it’s okay, because I amuse myself during laundry folding by attempting to do squats between sock-matching. Exercise is a great idea. My legs hurt. It was also a bad idea, because remember that half cup of tea? It’s now all jumbled up in my stomach.

I think about things that jumble up my stomach and it’s always the things that jumble up life. Things that I can’t control and yet insist up worrying about. I told my sis that I should write a blog post about “Learning to Live in Times of Transition,” but really, I can’t. Because I’m not an expert and I haven’t yet attained. I do know that it feels as if the last three years of my life have been constant transition. They have been the greatest tests of my ability to trust in God. Now I do believe that God prepared me for years and developed my heart and showed His faithfulness over and over again, so that when I got to marriage and was faced with so many life changes and possibilities (jobs! school! internships! ohmygoshwhatwillourlifelooklikeintenyears?!?), He would make me able to live at peace.

Our newest transition is something we’ve been thinking about for months. It must have been the first week of the fall semester 2013 when Brandon learned that summer engineering internships in his department (Petroleum & Natural Gas Engineering) were paid. And paid well. For some reason, we had always thrown that possibility out the window and understood that it would be more difficult for him to get a job out of college without an internship because he was working and going to school, because ya know, he has a wife and family (i.e. cat) to support. We just thought, this is one of those sacrifices we make. God will work it out. Well, God did work things out and continues to do that… though not in the way that we expected. In even better ways!

There were resume-passing out days and evenings when Brandon had to go to a few ‘information sessions,’ where he would talk impressively to recruiters—yeah, I think my husband is pretty impressive so I’m always happy when I notice other people noticing how impressive he is. Hehe. There were interviews. I don’t even remember how many. But I do know that by the end of recruiting week—actually about ten minutes after the recruiting time had closed—Brandon got a call from a large natural gas company recruiter with a summer internship offer.

It’s official, y’all--- we’re going south for the summer. Granted, it took moooonths for details to get hammered out and things are still being finalized (like where we’re gonna live!), but it’s official as it could be. We’re leaving after finals week in early May and will be back before the fall semester begins in late August. We are headed for Conway, Arkansas. We’re going to the middle of nowhere and that suits me fine. And yes, of course, I’m going with him. There was really no question in our minds about that; he talked about it in the interview. Where he goes, I go, cause that’s the way marriage works for us. And God’s hand is always working to be in our place of need before we even get there. I’ll be leaving my job that I’ve been at since I was 19 (it’s true!) to go with my husband hundreds of miles from the place I’ve called home for most of my life. Basically, I’m retiring or changing careers or becoming a domestic engineer or stay-at-home wife or something. We call it many different words, but always with wide smiles and happy hearts. Oh, I’ll surely be working… on something or at something. But we’re not sure what yet! And honestly, after being a full-time office worker + evening-and-weekend wedding photographer for years, I am ready for change.

I’m convinced that God always prepares us for times of transition. It may be just a feeling on the inside, a pressure of the Spirit, the gentle winds of change, the thoughts that turn to new pursuits, the heart that longs for new things. God is always working in our hearts. He is always guiding us through the maze of life, looking at the future which we can’t see. I feel like I have been prepared for this---this crazy idea of spending the summer in a new place. I feel like God is taking us there for a reason, that He is putting our feet in the path that He has carefully and perfectly laid out before us. I know that we are just discovering the treasures of His plans for us. We revel in the intricacies of His provision for us in this season so often. Things that could not have happened if we knocked on every door. Provision that couldn’t have happened without God’s oversight and us responding to His gentle instructions from even before our marriage. I could tell stories upon stories about things that we felt strongly about and so we did them, and they impacted our future. We couldn’t have known that simple actions would reap such harvests but they did.

So Arkansas. Yeah. We’re going to Arkansas.

It will be The Great Arkansas Adventure.


* My parents are the ever-supportive folks and also my dad has passed on his love of maps to me. They gave Brandon an Arkansas map for Christmas. Yay! I hate getting lost! I love maps!