Later today, we will be taking apart our bed and moving it into a storage unit. We have 9 days left in this house before we have to move, and it's quite a pressure-cooker. Over the past two months, we have sold or given away nearly all of our furniture and much of our other worldly possessions. We are down to beds, dressers and boxes filled with memories - photo albums, children's artwork, baby clothes for the next generation, etc. We will be moving into my mother's house which, ironically, will be going on the market within days of our arrival. So, we've had to rent a storage unit for the few things we've kept so that we don't clutter up her house as she's trying to impress potential buyers with its spaciousness.
I could write for a long time this morning - as I said, it's my last morning of comfort, albeit illusional comfort - the house is quiet and it's tempting to keep it that way while I ponder our present and future. But, the reality is that there remains a LOT of work to do and not much time in which to do it. So, I'm going to force myself instead, to rather baldly commit my latest learnings to this page for my own future referencing, and hope that it makes sense to the two or three other people who might ever read this.
We are just about out of money and God has yet to point us toward any obvious landmark. We have been living off of a loan from my retirement account and as of this morning, we have about $750 left to our name. Of course, the Navy owes my husband $700 for a show he performed nearly a month ago, but we've yet to see it. I realize that we may not be their priority, but a check from them would nearly double our assets. Anyway, I have found myself getting increasingly anxious - not sleeping, dwelling on certain bitter thoughts about others who I felt either bore some responsibility for our situation or who failed to understand our choices. I am overstating the case to some extent - mainly I have just trudged forward, doing what had to be done each day, and crossing things off of the endlessly self-generating to-do list. As an introvert, my pattern is to internalize and, in this case, to repress my negative feelings in ways which have made me increasingly less available to those around me. I may have thought that I was presenting the same self each day, but my husband and daughter had both begun to react in their own ways to my withdrawal.
Then, as I was reading my daily Bible reading (a habit I have thankfully kept up), I had a revelation. It dawned on me (literally - it was like the sun breaking over the horizon) that I was reenacting the very reason that I had left the church back in September. I had been frustrated by both their lack of courage and their lack of joy. When they had spoken the words, "... once our money is gone, we will cease to exist," I had been appalled. Where was the faith? Where was the recognition of a life based solely in God? What kind of a church truly believed that its identity revolved around its bank account and not around its relationship with the Holy One? And now, here I was.
When I had made the decision to resign from the church, to become unemployed, to lose our home and health insurance and to be forced into a radical recreation of our lives, I had believed what I had been preaching - that in putting ourselves completely into the hands of God, we were embarking on an adventure toward joy - the kind of joy which comes only after the full commitment. I had tried to tell the church that in letting go of their resources to seed ministries in the county, they were allowing God to teach them about radical discipleship, about trust, and about the abundance of God's resources available to those who walk humbly with their God. I had preached on holy curiosity, about moving past the certainties of human reality to enter into the miraculous new certainties of God's reality. But, they didn't bite. And, even then, I might still have stayed if they had expressed any joy in their choices. But, there was no joy there.
So, I had left to live the sermon. And, now, I realized that I had finally come to the place of reckoning. Now we were, in fact, coming to the place where our money would be gone - truly gone. And finally, after dragging my feet trying to slow the process of evaporation, after second-guessing myself and everyone around me, after becoming increasingly quiet and, yes, grim - finally God tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, "Good news! You're almost there." And I looked again and saw - "Good news - the money is almost gone. Good news - you're almost homeless. Good news - you're almost free of anything that might lure you away from complete and total trust in Me. You're almost there."
Suddenly, I realized the simple truth that we were just in the hard part of the journey, but that we were, in fact, still on the path. And I recognized that if I were going to become grim, I might just as well have stayed where I was. And so, as I leave the comfort of my bed for the last time in this house here in Maryland, I am once again choosing joy. I am rejoicing in the dawn and preparing for a new day in God's loving and creative presence.
p.s. later that day: I just discovered the remarkable fact that the Navy must be monitoring my blog - our check arrived this afternoon.
