Our thoughts turn into prayers, and I don’t know if they were our thoughts first or His. But when our thoughts are His thoughts, our prayers become reality because He is such a troublemaker sometimes.

There was no railroad there now, but someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed. The tracks and the trains were not there now, but Laura could see them almost as if they were there.

Suddenly she asked, “Pa, was that what made the very first railroad?”

“What are you talking about?” Pa asked.

“Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren’t there?”

Pa thought a minute. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, that’s what makes things happen, people think of them first.”

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake

Two years ago I wrote a list of things I would do if I had more time – all the millions of things we couldn’t do because Vince commuted (and did all of our family shopping) for almost 60 hours a week – and none of them were ambitious. They were pathetically in the vein of survival mode.

Find a therapist for one of the kids. Attend FreshStart with one of the other kids. Read all the books and watch all the videos and resources and trainings for our kids’ special needs. Buy pajamas for Finnegan, and get a haircut, and start putting effort into cooking better meals again. Clean the bathroom, and eat breakfast before noon.

Most of them never got done. Well, sometimes I cleaned the bathroom. And the older kids learned to cook.

Many of those things, looking back, I wish we could have done somehow. Seems like we would have benefited from them, but for crying out loud, we must breathe sometime. And there was no time.

We wanted to be together more, and together less. We needed one-on-one time with each of the kids and each other. Vince needed to be home more for the kids, and I needed to be out of the house more for my own sanity.

But other things were on that list, too. We both wanted to be more involved in ministry. I wanted to visit my grandma more often. I wanted to write daily, and study, and not feel guilty about it because there was always something else I should be doing.

I wanted to finish the books I’d started. And Vince did, too.

And maybe you noticed – I purposefully left that goal vague when I wrote it, unsure if I meant the books I’d started reading or the books I’d started writing. Because I wanted both, but was afraid to hope that big.

It was a someday-but-probably-never kind of daydream.

Until about five weeks ago.

What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives – something that wasn’t there before….What is synergy? Simply defined, it means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Five weeks ago, Vince went back to work after taking a month off to finish some backburner projects we’d been praying about for years. On the last day of his vacation, we closed on this house. And we felt strongly that even though he was going back to work, it was only temporary.

We had no idea how it could possibly be temporary; we only knew that God had been talking to us for a long time about a big move and it didn’t just mean our physical location.

We asked Him for years for this move, and He finally said, How bad do you want it? If I give it to you, will you really take it?

The next day was the day of the fridge and the frenulum, and in that post I mentioned a phone meeting with our insurance guy. What I didn’t mention was that during that discussion we learned that a smallish, forgotten nest egg we’d plugged away at for years had actually made itself useful.  And God asked us, Do you believe Me now?

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don’t know what new dangers and challenges you’ll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

And it’s sort of like when we got married: We eloped, but we talked to my dad ahead of time. Just like then, Vin was a little terrified to tell him, but also just like then, Dad was full of encouragement and good counsel. He said, in so many words, you have to take the risk to know if you can make it.

So, friends: Vince has worked for the same company for 21 years, and he put in his notice this week.

We’ll be home together, out and about together, and working together and separately. His first book is already off to the editor and should launch early this summer. My second book is a month or two behind his (can’t wait to show you the cover!), and the third should come out this fall.

We have a kid who’s on his last year home with us, and we want to do this thing together. We have six other kids we want to make great memories with, and we want to show them what’s beyond the fifty mile radius around us. We haven’t ventured past that in over five years.

We have a bazillion other ideas involving print and publishing, business and ministry, fellowship and community, deep and wide. But mostly, we are available for whatever He has for us, because He is always making something out of nothing. And He’s still moving us.