Hey God! Do you know what direction we are going?

As tough as this semester has been, we like to laugh about it if we can. (If we don't laugh, we'll end up crying). Proverbs 17:22 "A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones." I hope by laughing it will mend the overwheliming brokeness that has been in our hearts. If we walk around being angry, hurt, and bitter about what has happened, then we will probably be about as useful as dry bones (which I equate in my mind with dead bones laying in a desert...)

Something that has made me laugh is just the sheer irony of where we can come from as a married couple and where we are going now...


A week or so back James and I were traveling to Indiana to look at houses. Normally in the car I'm pretty talkative. I relish in the fact that we are stuck in the car together for several hours and I can chat on end with James. We both really love car rides together. However, I was quiet on the way down thinking of all the things that I would miss about MI. As I was thinking about this, James and I had to turn left and it ended up being a little dangerous! As everyone in MI knows, you can't just turn left across several lanes of traffic. No, we are a little crazy in MI, we have to go right to go left (as we found out it is actually a great safety precaution!). After our endeavor to cross four lanes of traffic and turn left rather than just turn right, merge to the extra left lane, and then cruise nicely into traffic I blurted out loud, "I'm even going to miss Michigan u-turns." James started to laugh and I joined him realizing how ridiculous I must have sounded to him because I hadn't said hardly anyting for most of the trip.


Now the "go right to turn left" thing really isn't a u-turn, but we started to talk about u-turns. They are funny because they take you exactly where you were coming from. When we become Christians, the last thing we normally want to do is take a u-turn and go back to the lives we were once living. The thing is, that is exactly where James and my life are heading.


Our first year of marriage, neither of us went to school. We took that year off. James worked in a factory working long hours. It was horrendous. We didn't get to spend much time with him, and when we did he was usually grumpy due to lack of sleep and the stress of his job. As spring and summer approached we decided we were going to go back to school so that we could have a better life than that. James wanted to work at a job where he would change students lives and where he would be able to work normal hours and spend time with us. It lead us to Cornerstone where we put in 4 years of hard work.

This spring was supposed to be an exciting time for us. James would be graduating and getting his dream job as a teacher changing student's lives. Instead it was a nightmare and all of the dreams that we had were ripped away from us.

And now here we were on a trip to Indiana to start to get ready for his new job down there... Another factory job... the exact thing that 4 years ago we had wanted to get away from, it was our reason for starting school again.


It was just weird. It felt like we were doing a u-turn in life, like we were going back to the thing that we had wanted to get away from. Our situation has been completely out of our control. It's funny because we were origionally praying how we would like our situation to turn out and how we wanted God to come through. It finally got to a point where everything around us was so crazy that we would throw our hands up and say, "Okay Holy Spirit do your thing because we have no idea how to pray for this...":)


I guess when life gets so crazy, it puts you in a good position to let God just takeit becuase you don't know what to do anymore. Well, I don't know what that Holy Spirit told God, but now he is taking us on this crazy ride that we don't understand. Yes folks, he pulled a u-turn. I am in the back screaming "Hey God, do you know where we are going?" We continue to go the same direction so I scream a little more frantically "Hey God! did you know we are doing a u-turn, aren't we going the wrong direction!?"


It cracks me up, because here we are frantic in the back seat wondering what in the world he is doing, and God just continues cruising on peacefully because he knows the bigger picture.

Heres what we are holding to:

2nd Chronicles 20:12b "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you."

This whole chapter has helped us to keep up hope during our dark times this semester, but I love this part because we don't know what God is doing with our lives.

We had this fall all planned out. James would have a teaching job, we would get a little house, and we would have a solid income with great health insurance. Our lives would finally be steady and normal compared to the crazy life trying to be students and work with not much of an income. Really, we have no idea where our lives are going to lead now, we don't know why God is taking us in the direction we are going, but we will continue to have faith and hope in him.