Stuck In The Waiting

This season of life is weird.
It is wonderful.
It totally stinks.
It is amazing.
So completely horrible.
It is beautiful...........We are stuck in the in-between.....we are stuck in the waiting. The time before God points us toward something and before the fog lifts and we can actually see where He's pointing.

The first week of April began our journey. We felt it coming, however, long before. We knew in our heart of hearts, or what we would call our spirit, that God was doing something significant - growing us in a new way - changing something, somewhere, somehow. We just didn't know what. Ironically, we still don't.

Chris found out that the job he had that gave us the majority of our income alongside pastoring Jacob's Well Church, would be closing it's doors. He has been a bi-vocational pastor since we arrived in Boise, Idaho in 2011. It is how we best felt God could use our call to begin a church - to work in and among the community, bringing in income to survive as a family, and grow roots where we lived and ministered. It has been a tough choice, but what we thought was best for serving our family and community.

That same week we also found out that the new owners of our home wanted to move in. God had prepared our hearts to hear that, but we still struggled with the dual hit to our family. Chris, as the main provider of our family, has carried it a lot more intimately than I have - I will tell you why in a second. God designed him with a specific and deep desire to shelter and provide for us, and I love that about Chris. It has caused me to pray in a new way for his heart and significant role in our family.

Chris has a unique history when it comes to this kind of journey. Chris grew up with a dad that chased the dream of a certain job all the way to the deep ruin of his family. Because of this, his family was homeless for a time. As a child, Chris lived in a tent as well as in a small camp trailer during their homelessness. He showered in the concrete car wash bays of a car sales lot. He watched his parents divorce and his family fall a part. He has carried our current situation with deep pain.

Nothing of our current story is comfortable. But this one thing I have been led to speak over Chris and have asked God to redeem the past in Chris' heart - "You are not your father. What is happening to us is not a cycle or a result of anything that happened to your family when you were young.  This is NOT the same thing. You are a son of the King. You are Chris - your name means Christ-bearer. I love you. The King sees this. He will take care of us." Those last few lines I speak over him almost every day - sometimes multiple times a day. God has asked me to declare over Chris WHO he is - a son of the King - Christ-bearer - loved by me.

I have never seen my husband weep like he did the day I spoke those words over him - that he is not doing to us what his father did to them. The kids watched their daddy sob on the floor. God redeemed something in Chris in those moments.

Our three kids have watched us pray on our knees. They have watched us hold each other and cry out to the King. They have joined us in prayer on our bed and have grown in their faith as well. For that I am grateful for this journey.

A lot of this story has done something in us toward restoration, redemption, and trust. It is wonderful and deeply difficult. But we KNOW God is at work.

What is weird is that we have had a couple homes that we have been approved for at different times over the last month, and both times, we have felt deeply that it was NOT our home. One of those times we felt it so heavily that we knew if we signed the papers, we would be disobeying God's heart for us. We even had to tell one landlord the morning of our signing that the night before, God had made us both significantly uneasy about our decision, and we needed to obey His direction. That was a fun moment. Ugh.

We have had a number of job offers to Chris and each time we knew that they were NOT the jobs for him. We even applied for something that we felt was a potential open door, and the door swung shut fairly quickly. You have to admit that it a very humbling place, especially when his current job will be ending today. It's even more of a weird spot when an entire community is watching and hearing our personal faith in a God who provides and whose timing is perfect.....and to tell them that we have no home or job yet when we have said NO to a couple options. It makes little to no sense. But Chris and I have been reminded that Noah built an ark in a desert because God said so, and the Israelite people marched around Jericho because God said so, and God used a donkey to speak redemption into a dude because God opened it's mouth, and Jesus, the Son of God, died on a cross to save the world.....and then CAME back to LIFE........so I guess being stuck in the waiting with options that we've turned down because we hear the King say, "No, not that one", isn't too far fetched. But when IS He going to show us? When will He speak, "Here is the way - walk in it." Ugh. I don't know.

This season of life is weird.
It is wonderful.
It totally stinks.
It is amazing.
So completely horrible.
It is beautiful...........We are stuck in the in-between.....we are stuck in the waiting.