Obedience is not easy...

Five years ago this week, my husband and I, along with our 2-year-old daughter, 1 year-old son, and father-in-law and mother-in-law arrived in Pennsylvania after a 7 day journey across the country from the Phoenix, AZ area. It was a long week, filled with much adventure and even more anticipation. The kids screamed every time we placed them in their car seats for another long day's journey. I marveled at the many different areas of the country I had never seen in my 28 years of life. Daniel and I talked with his parents about what our new life might possibly be like. We had only seen the area we were moving to once before, 3 months prior when we flew out without the kids for our second interview with the school we were soon to be officially employed by. My in-laws had seen the area many years previously when they were in the same town on a family vacation. They were along to help us to settle in for a week before our training started.

This was the start of our new life. I couldn't believe it. We were the least likely of any of our siblings to move away from our family, our friends, our church. Moving away is one thing. Moving 2600 miles away is another. Most days I was excited about our fresh start. Other days I wondered about my sanity. Ultimately I kept coming back to our reason for moving in the first place. Obedience. Plain and simple. Obedience. God called us to this new life. In order to understand what it is we do and our journey to this place in our lives, I need to go even further back in time...back to when our first daughter was born.

In 2002, shortly after the birth of our oldest child, Daniel and I both felt the Lord leading us to quit our jobs as public school teachers. I had always dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom, but had no idea how to make this work with the debt we had incurred. We turned in our resignations at the beginning of April that year. I was already on maternity leave for 13 weeks and finished off the last 3 weeks of the school year. I packed up my classroom, then ended up teaching part-time for 4 weeks during the summer in a different district. The plan was for Daniel to find a higher paying job in the business world, and I would provide child care in our home for a teacher friend's child (who was a mere 8 weeks younger than our daughter). Daniel found a job working with someone from our church and I prepared our house for the invasion of a second infant. Sounds like a doable plan, right?

Let's just say that the plan worked, but not always in the way WE had intended it to. I found out when our daughter was only 6 months old that I was pregnant with baby #2. Right about this time I had also taken on a neighbor's 1-year-old part-time. Hmmmm...caring for 3 children, ages 1-year-old or less and pregnant! My days were filled with changing diapers, feeding babies, cleaning up, changing more diapers, feeding babies again, changing more diapers...you get the picture. I was utterly exhausted most days.

Fast forward a few months. Daniel had lost his initial job and was unemployed. He substituted and looked for a more permanent job in the meantime. Life was certainly stressful. Despite this, I remember these times fondly because we began to see God work in our life in a way we never had before. Money was scarce and bills were plenty. Our savings account was slowly dwindling to nothing and we wondered many days how we were going to make the next mortgage payment.

One day I sat at the kitchen table, praying to God that He would provide a way for us to buy a few groceries. We were not going hungry, but our cupboards were looking a little sparse. A short time later, I walked down the street to check the mail. I sat down at the same spot at the kitchen table and began to sort through the many envelopes. One of the first things I opened was a card from a family at church. They encouraged us to keep trusting in the Lord and told us they were praying for us. I smiled at their encouragement and love for us, then looked down at something that had fallen out of the card. A gift card for $50 to a local grocery store! I balled my eyes out for about 5 minutes, thanking and praising God with every part of my being. The Creator of the Universe cared enough about me to answer my measly little prayer for a way to buy some food. I had been a Christian since I was a young child, but this was seriously a huge turning point in my relationship with the Lord.

This was only the beginning of many more times where God's protection and care in my family's life was completely evident. He has travelled with us (and often carried us) through some pretty difficult points in our lives. Yes, our journey to Pennsylvania was (and is still!) an adventure, but it was also (and continues to be) filled with trials of all sorts. More snapshots from our journey of obedience to follow in future posts.