This little light of mine.

Six and a half years ago we decided it was time to go. It was time to pack up and get out of Michigan before it crumbled on us and swallowed us whole. There are so many reasons I wanted to leave I can't even count them....It was a daunting task to step out into the unknown with a two year old marriage, an eight month old baby,\ a ten year grace filled career, not a dime in my pocket..you get the drift. It was major. The only place I could think of to go was back to the place that lit up my life once before. Minnesota. We slapped a for-sale sign in the front window of the trailer home I owned and I sat that the computer to pursue my future job in Minnesota. It was there I made a split second decision that can only be accounted to God. I started my search in Orlando, Florida.

And just like that, that very night I found the job I have had for the past six years. It took three long months to secure it but when I saw it listed there I knew it was for me. I think I was somewhat akin to a stalker calling again and again. Apparently the organization I work for took its time to hand pick people from all around the world. What I failed to see in it all is that it didn't matter what I did, what was meant to be would be.

 But I kicked in all my extra efforts just to be sure. However that back fired and I will tell ya why. We found a buyer for our place in no time flat. Meant to be. And we realized my organization was perusing me so Binyam boarded a flight to Florida to look into a job prospect and left me for a few days alone with my five month old. Two days into it I pulled a muscle in my lower back that literally crippled me. It was beyond horrible I had no one to call for help, and spent a few hours crying, crawling around my house and carrying my baby like a monkey before I got help. I didn't give a passing thought, in the pain I was in, to going to the hospital. They gave me a cocktail of muscle relaxers which I promptly took and passed out till a phone ringing woke me up the next morning. Guess who that was. My first phone interview. Yep. Imagine the worst case scenario and that was the interview. I got off the phone and pretty much gave up on that dream.

What God purposed couldn't be thwarted by anything I did or didn't do. they called me back for a second interview for which I was drug free, nailed it and got the job. I packed up my life and left shortly after. I hadn't ever vistited headquarters where I work now. Didn't see the house we were moving into untill we turned the key in the lock. But I knew it was "a place in the Son" because it wasn't about me at all.

The job was wonderful but I mourned the active, verbal enviornment that was Boysville which I traded in for a cubicle with NO view. I also had big plans I had conjured up in my head about this place being like Bethany was. I realized there is no place ever on earth like Bethany was because Bethany was tuely at its core about who was there with me and they were not who was here. I thought I would be connecting back with missions like before, but things are never like they once were and I realized that with a bit of a broken heart.

Broken. Healing. This is where God wanted me. its a radical way to shift perspective, but right where I was meant to be, a theme so it seems......My ways are not God's ways and that is the beauty of it. Didn't we all sing when we were little, 'He's Got The Whole World In His Hands" that childlike faith that didn't question has long since grown up and embraced other ideas more conventional. Till the conventional ideas break into a million different pieces. Broken.

Healing comes from the balm that is understanding. I was in a new role. A mom. That was it and that is what I was not embracing fully. I hadn't shifted my eyes from the "greener grasses" of my past. God knew something I didn't, shocking I know. Time was passing. Ticking tocking past me moment by moment while I was looking the other way. The breaking sound snapped me back to reality, I do have a light to shine but it was no longer mine. My little lights......Ella and Ezra.

This was the gift God gave me bringing me to Florida. Had it been Minnesota,  I would have been looking the other direction and it might have been too late. Embrace being a mom, there will only ever be one last day of first grade. You don't get to say that every day....one last day of first grade. My today. I embrace it, because its fleeting....

Six years later.....I am where he has me.