Category Archives: grief

making change: a journal of grief, growth, & becoming, part 3

Posted on by April 22, 2026

I like to tell people that I’ve overcome insomnia. What I have not overcome is Dasher, our adorable 24-toed cat, who has developed a habit of singing the song of her people in the wee hours.

She does this in the stairwell, which makes sense because it has the best acoustics.

So even after being evicted, insomnia likes to come back for visits. It opens the door without knocking, waves to its friend menopause (it’s a crowded house here lately), and then kicks back, waiting for Dash to start performing her favorite solo from Aida.

making change: a journal of grief, growth, & becoming, part 3

Sometimes I beat them all and fall back to sleep. Other times, my brain starts opening all the tabs, alternating between praying about the price of gas to pondering the cost of misunderstandings, and all things between. Grandma takes up more and more tabs lately (filed under Memories, Changes, and Grief) as her dementia has progressed. Which means she is regressing, and it feels like the exact opposite of progress.

I lay there in the dark, thinking on conversations and concerns. Another tab opens, reminding me of Barbara O’Neill’s teaching on sleep where she warns that the lack of it is related to dementia.

Irony and pressure are terrible sedatives, you know.

The next morning I stumbled on a post about biphasic sleep, a concept I first heard about years ago because insomnia and I are old frenemies. It means sleeping in two phases, often called “first sleep” and “second sleep,” separated by a two-ish hour waking period in the middle of the night, whether or not your cat is attempting opera. It was common (some say standard) before the Industrial Revolution, and now that you know about it, you’ll see it mentioned in everything from history books to Dickens novels.

In theory, I’d love to lean into it and utilize those extra couple hours in fruitful ways. I’ve done it before when our schedule allowed and it’s a much better alternative than staring at the ceiling and fretting about the rapidly diminishing hours of possible sleep left.

But often our schedule doesn’t allow for it, like last night (er, this morning) when I went back to bed around 6 am and then wanted to sleep in until tomorrow.

Maybe some day it’ll work, though. Our schedule changed significantly four times in the last year, and at this point what’s left is more of a loose structure wrapped around a few big commitments, and held together with prayer, coffee, and a Jeep that is happy to zip back and forth across the MatSu as long as we keep filling its tank.

On the way home one evening last week, I passed our friends’ shop and saw our red-haired son at work, backing into a bay. He didn’t notice me but my heart stretched from its tether a little as I drove past. It is these small moments of recognition that anchor us, making a broad, wide Valley into a small town we belong in.

Now that she’s moved, it’s 21 minutes to Grandma’s new home on weekdays but only 18 on Sunday afternoons. So far, she does not understand the change, and every day she seems confused anew about why she’s there. She does not have those small moments of recognition yet, or anymore; her anchor was lifted up and she’s been moored in an unfamiliar place.

“I am so far away from my home…it must be forty miles.” She calculates highway time and neighborhood roads. Sometimes she thinks she’s in Anchorage.

“It’s only 20 minutes, Grandma. You’re right in the middle of all of us.” She looks at me in disbelief, like I answered in a foreign language.

“All I can do is look out this window. There’s no activity out there.”

But there is, though she can’t see it. A house is being built right next door and equipment has been running every day. When I walked up to her new front door, I distinctly heard one of the construction workers articulate the same expletive she shocked us with last week.

Four times so far I’ve had the same heartbreaking conversation with her, trying to explain, wondering how to answer so many of her concerns. I need to be home. I was active there, and here I do nothing. I haven’t seen a soul all day; I think I’ve only had one small meal and it’s horrible hospital food. No one has come to see me, I’ve just been left here, alone. And who is going to take care of my cat?

People visit almost every day. The staff is kind, with her all the time, giving her one-on-one attention. It is a home, not a hospital, and the food – three meals plus snacks – is homemade and amazing. She was mostly chair-bound at her house and slept much of the day, but now she is awake more, even playing the piano. And her cat died a month ago.

Before, she was tired but mostly content; now she is awake more, and feels like she’s in exile. It is a horrible disease that demands caregivers to constantly choose between comforting, condescending lies and heartbreaking truth.

So there is a difference between reality and perception, and I do not know how to help her bridge that gap.

But she’s talking again, more than she has been. When she’s not focused on the grief, she still tells repetitive stories from her childhood.

Last month, back at her house, she told us again about working at a store when she was a kid:

“Somebody would come in for something that was only a dollar or two. They might give you a twenty dollar bill, or they might even give you a hundred, and you had to be able to make the change for whatever it was they gave you. I learned.”

My daughter and my cousin sat on the couch to her left, and I crocheted granny squares in the rocking chair to her right. I hit the Record button on my phone so I can go back and hear her voice when I need it.

“I was pretty good with the dollars, and I could make the change.”

The kids were on the floor, at the table, across the room, all doing schoolwork.

“Our floor walker was an older lady and I think she kind of liked me. She was the one who trained me, and then she trained me to train others. So I had a pretty good little job there in that store. I got along pretty well with all of them…I learned to make change, learned how to handle hundred dollar bills. You could carry a certain amount on yourself in a money belt to make change with.”

This is the challenge we all face when we find ourselves in a place we never would have chosen, with bills that are too big for us, with the situation that is out of our control: Will we make the change? Will we get along with others, and navigate with grace and trust? Or will we cling to denial, and keep getting our heart broken when reality confronts us with every new day?

Also: What can we carry on ourselves to help us (and others) make change?

“I worked there for a number of years and I really enjoyed it. I got several raises there along the way. I didn’t have a way to go home, but usually the Greyhound bus ran and I could get off in time to get to the bus station and get on the Greyhound; I rode ten miles home.”

She often talks about the journey: the bus, her mom driving her back and forth to work, and about her first bike.

“In the winter time I worked in the store, and sometimes I worked up on the farm, but mostly I learned to work in the stores and rode that Greyhound bus home every night. They’d ring that bell and he knew right where I lived, and he’d let me off right where the gate was. God was good to me. I was very grateful.”

This right here is the key in all our changes: Gratitude, which is based in trust.

In this hard space – in debt, in betrayal, in regret, in the ICU, in grief, or in a place where no one speaks our language – can we trust God and rejoice anyway? Not because the awful stuff is His will (it’s not) but because He is able to bring good from these hard things?

He likes us, and He is training us. Not just for ourselves, but so we can also train others.

He knows where we are, where we need to be, and how to get us there.

We would not have chosen this, but God is busy with us, at work in us and for us, so He must be doing things we could not or would not have done on our own.

Grandma was long-winded that day and her memories kept coming.

“Then one year I got terribly sick and had quite a bit of time in the hospital. I don’t remember what it was I had…whatever it was, eventually I got over it.”

“Was it scarletina?” I asked. “Scarlet fever?” Grandma didn’t answer; her hearing aid was on the other side. I looked at my cousin. “She told me about it in 2020, because she had been quarantined when she was young.”

Ohh, he nodded. Grandma was quiet for a minute, slowing down.

“But God was good to me,” she finally said. “I got over it, eventually.”

Friend, hear me: God is good to us whether we get over it or not. We are better to ourselves, though, if we do.

At that point, that day, she was talked out. Shortly after, she wanted us to leave – at first with a subtle hints, then later with anxiety, thinking she needed to start making dinner and get her kitchen cleaned up. But I had already cleaned her kitchen, dinner was taken care of, and she hasn’t made a meal in I don’t know how long.

And she could not be left alone, so we had to stay with her in her restlessness.

She has made change before, so many times. This time it’s much bigger than just a small shift in schedules or overcoming insomnia or learning a new job, but I want her to remember that she can do this, too.

Whenever we are uprooted or navigating some other big change, we tend to feel like our struggle is a sign of failure. But that is an agreement we make with the enemy, not God. It is a spiral of self-fulfilling discouragement: We focus on the negative, and that negative becomes our new reality.

But how can we deal with whatever life gives us? How do we survive the place we didn’t choose?

Here’s the truth, if we can accept it: The struggle and feeling of ineptitude is progress. Feeling bad about our abilities and our current situation – as long as that feeling is temporary and we don’t stay there – is a sign of growth.

We don’t grow in the ease of the comfort zone; we grow in the struggle. The feelings of learning to do this specific task or navigate this particular season are temporary. They are not our permanent identity.

We must reframe our assessment: I currently feel terrible at this rather than “I’m just bad at this and I’ll never be good at it.” I don’t feel happy here, rather than “Happiness doesn’t exist here.”

We go through this in every big change: Having more kids, learning a language, reading classics, acquiring a new skill, developing new routines, systems, or habits. We are face to face with our own imperfections and weakness, and must let go of our illusions.

We must release the idolatry of our own control, the myopia of mastering our own tiny domain where everything is in the order we established.

When we do that, we make room for the wild of the Kingdom.

But if we are still not wanting to make change in this hard place, the Lord is never just asking us to get over it. We often want that for ourselves, or for each other, because grief is inconvenient. But He is staying with us – never dismissing us, never blowing us off, never rushing us to gloss over pain and pretend we’re happy when we’ve been completely unmoored.

He sits with us in our bewilderment, much more patient with us than we are with ourselves, or each other.

As I sit with Grandma in her grief and confusion, even though I have no answers for her and feel almost as confused as she is, I know I am growing in this. It is hard and I hate it; I hate watching her regress and accuse and be less than who I’ve always known her to be. But this is training. If you’ve paid any attention to basic demographics, you know our generation is just beginning to see what may be an avalanche of care needed in the years to come.

As Grandma looks out the window at all the things she cannot see, she is growing, too. Even when the progress is regress and none of it feels good, she is rising above, alert in ways she hasn’t been for months. Even in her grief, she is so sweet to the staff at the new home and they love her. Even in her anger, she is digging deep into memories and logic and reasoning in ways that I thought went dormant months ago.

We stretch our tent pegs to allow God to show us that in our weakness He is strong. In our inability, He is able, and making us able, too.

It is how we overcome, how we beat them all.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

— Hebrews 12:28-29

He has not abandoned us, dropped us off in an unfamiliar place to be alone and die.

He has not removed us from our home.

He is preparing us for it, and taking us there.

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learning languages: a journal of grief, growth, & becoming, part 2

Posted on by April 1, 2026

Every week at Grandma’s is different now. She was chattier in December and January; she ate lunch with us sometimes. She knew me, and mostly knew who the kids were.

learning languages: a journal of grief, growth, and becoming, part 2

One week we talked about homeschooling, which she did with her youngest two boys. She watched as the kids kept coming over for me to check their work or answer questions.

“How do you keep it all straight?” she asked.

“I don’t know…how did you?”

“I don’t know.” She almost grinned. “I’m glad I had all I could handle. It was a good thing. It was good for all of us, good learning for all of us.”

It is good to have all we can handle, to be stretched beyond what we think we can do…as long as we don’t give up. As long as we lean on Him. Because in spite of what people say, He will give us more than we can handle, because that’s how we grow. That’s also how, when we do the thing that was too much for us to do on our own, we recognize His grace.

We never accomplish alone, in our own strength, by our own brainpower.

And this is good news because I’ve been feeling very stupid lately while learning Greek. It is a beautiful, aggravating language that fools you with easy words like “párti” for party, and “souper market” for super market, but as soon as your guard is down it smacks you upside the head with i̱lektronikós ypologistí̱s, which is ten syllables just to say “computer.”

I know I’ve made fun of English for being stupid, but at least we have sensible blends, like sl in slow, or br in brown. For the most part, our letters flow in a civilized manner.

But in Greek, you have hard consonants like k and t at the beginning of words like ktizo (“to build”). You have phrases like esy ftiaxneis (“you make”), and you wonder WHAT in the WORLD are you supposed to do with that second word because f and t are together at the beginning of it, and you’ve also got to figure out how to deal with that weird xn in the middle.

Hint: You almost (but not quite) get rid of the “s” sound in the x, so what you’re left with, phonetically spelled, is…

[types, then quickly deletes]

…something you shouldn’t try pronouncing around your kids. Or your grandma, even if she’s Irish.

It’s sort of like learning to play violin: No one should do it until they’re an expert.

But here we are, asked to do so many things before we are experts, before we even have the slightest clue what we are really doing. Instead, we are living in ironic juxtaposition that seems to make no sense.

I do not know how we are keeping it all straight; I actually don’t think we are, at all. I think we have situations like those hard consonants that don’t normally blend, and suddenly they’re holding hands and swing dancing drunkenly together anyway, teaching us whole new sounds we never imagined. Párti.

A friend shared this a while back, and it stuck with me:

source

Can you handle feeling incompetent long enough to attain fluency? This is not just about languages, of course.

It is slow work, this absorbing and distilling and creating. Remember, we are not performing, we are becoming.

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
here a little, there a little.

– Isaiah 28:10

And more good news: God knows what we’re doing and where we’re going, long before we do. He is training us for the journey, making us like Him when we let Him.

He is putting us where He wants us, and preparing us for what’s ahead.

In the Old Testament I’ve made it to Judges, which is sort of the Best and Worst of Bible Stories. I’m currently still toward the beginning where it’s pretty normal, before you get to the what-the-what parts that remind us once again that just because we read about someone in Scripture, it doesn’t mean God wants us to imitate them.

I would, however, love to add t-shirts to our merch page that advertise “Jael’s camping gear”…tents, hammers, gorgeous rugs, mugs of warm milk…I digress.

We do need to talk about Jael though, because she’s a prime example of someone being where you don’t expect them to be, doing what you don’t expect them to do.

We’re in Judges 4, when Deborah, a prophetess, is judging Israel. She was an answer to prayer after twenty years of the Israelites’ sin and oppression, and with her leadership, they were finally ready to stand up to their oppressor: King Jabin of Hazor.

So Deborah summoned Barak and gave him the word from the Lord, telling him how to defeat Sisera, the general of the King Jabin’s army. Barak said he’d only go if Deborah went with him, and she said, Sure, but since you were a pansy, you won’t be able to take out Sisera; the Lord is going to let a woman do it. My paraphrase.

Instructions and strategy follow, and then we get to this odd sentence right in the middle of the action. No segue, no transition, no apparent reason why it’s there at all:

Now Heber the Kenite had separated from the other Kenites, that is, the descendants of Hobab the father-in-law of Moses, and had encamped as far away as Elon-bezaanannim, which is near Kedesh.

– Judges 4:11

And we’re like, Who is this guy, and why do we care? What is he even doing here? But if you know the story, you know where this is going and why that sentence is there.

In our lives though, we usually don’t know the full story. Our strange little sidebars and interruptions seem completely out of place. We often think we are out of place.

So was Heber. Heber the Kenite had moved far away…sounds like the beginning of a limerick by Dr. Suess.

Anyway, after that odd sentence we jump right back into the action again: Sisera knows the Israelites are on the move, so he calls his 900 chariots and they start to move, too, but the Lord is there and He throws Sisera’s army into a panic. Sisera flees on foot while Barak pursues his chariots and army to Sisera’s hometown, Harosheth-ha-goiim, a place that would only be harder to pronounce if it were Greek.

But Sisera flees on foot in a different direction…and we find out why Heber was mentioned earlier.

Now Sisera had fled away on foot to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite –

(Ohhhh…but wait, there’s more!)

…for there was peace between King Jabin of Hazor and the clan of Heber the Kenite.

– Judges 4:17

Heber the Kenite had moved far away…because his family was on friendly terms with the king who was oppressing the Israelites. The King that the Lord had sold them into for their disobedience.

The king who was Sisera’s boss.

The Lord put Heber where He wanted him, because…you know this story, right?

Jael, his wife was at home for the day…

Because Heber’s wife had a destiny to introduce the temple of Sisera’s head to the business end of her tent peg.

And now our limerick is complete:

Heber the Kenite had moved far away
Jael, his wife, was at home for the day
Where Sisera had fled
Wanting drink, and a bed
But her hammer made certain he’d stay.

(Thank you, thank you.)

Let’s pause here for a few important questions:

  • Can we handle feeling displaced long enough to defeat the enemy?
  • Are we mature enough to emotionally regulate ourselves, in spite of the enemy’s threat, and in spite of not knowing exactly what we’re doing?
  • Are we going to agree with smallness and shrink back, or are we willing to go and do what He sends us to, when we don’t have the full plan?

We might be where we’re at because we need this practice.

That conversation with Grandma I mentioned earlier was one of our last coherent talks. She has been so far away since then; she can barely hear me, usually doesn’t understand me, and sometimes doesn’t recognize me. She is displaced and none of us like learning this new language.

But I know growth is happening under the surface, in relationships and minds and hearts. God is giving us more than we can handle, and we’re feeling stretched and stupid and humbled as we attain a new kind of fluency.

We are learning why certain things trigger us, why we are withdrawing, and we’re finding new words for feelings we’ve never identified or bothered to articulate before.

Still, it feels like no one should have to do this until they’re an expert. And none of us want to be experts at this.

No one wants to be an expert in grief, displacement, brokenness, or feeling stupid in the things we wish we already understood.

Instead of neglecting your garden in the hope that God will rescue you from this situation and send you somewhere else, go rake your garden. Take care of your garden as if this season was the last season and you want to leave it beautiful for the next family who uses it.

– Katie James, Tetragon Lift

Is this the last season? In so many ways, yes. We do not know how much time we have left in anything, with anyone.

Last week, Grandma gave me a long hug when we were leaving. With her face in my hair, she said, “You be safe going home, now.”

I want that for her, too. We want to steward these days well, however many are left.

What feels too hard will become more familiar. The sounds we don’t know how to make will start rolling off our tongues with a little more practice. We won’t feel stupid in this area forever. (We’ll gain fluency and feel stupid in other areas, instead.)

We cannot keep it all straight, and it is more than we can handle, but we are not handling it on our own. This is where we recognize His grace, and it is good learning for all of us.

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the long way: a journal of grief, growth, & becoming, part 1

Posted on by March 13, 2026

The snow fell that day without punctuation: no commas, no periods, just a steady run-on sentence of accumulation. I love the snow when we’re home, and for the last several years, we’ve been home a lot. But not in this season.

the long way: a journal of grief, growth, and becoming, part 1

In this season, we drive to Palmer at least three times a week. And it’s not just all the commuting, but it’s also home repair and two of our kids learning to drive and health issues that need to resolve plus my grandma’s care and about four seven situations I can’t write publicly about and also it seems like the WORST time in the world to go back to school because I turn fifty this year for crying out loud and it’s not like either time or money have been just overflowing around here but this is what He’s called us to so there we are.

So my thoughts have been unpunctuated, too.

You probably have your own sentences like that.

When we have unpunctuated sentences without enough breathing room for even a comma, we have to wonder what the Lord is up to.

A website login asks, “What is four plus 13?” and you stall for half a second, thrown by the words mixed with numbers, wondering if this is still English or if you just need more coffee or if you finally lost it. It’s not stupidity or exhaustion or insanity; it’s the congestion of everything running through your thoughts, overwhelming the system.

We’re dealing with paradox and irony, things that do go to together even though they seem incongruent on the surface. The math adds up, but we need to pause and think about it differently because the questions aren’t what we expected.

We take a step back, and look at the big picture.

In these seasons, we have responsibilities on the front burner, concerns on the back burner, and other needs waiting on the counter for their turn. A faint sound of dripping that should probably be identified and dealt with. And sometimes, sirens in the distance.

Multiple things are happening simultaneously, but we’ve attempted to recognize priorities. We are also painfully aware of our own limitations, and our need for grace – for God to do (or help us do) the things we can’t naturally accomplish on our own.

Does this sound familiar?

Personally, I’m seeing a little progress because a few weeks ago I wrote, “I have written thousands and thousands of words, but they’ve just sat in my documents. I could not trust myself to publish without drawing blood,” but this week I finally had three days in a row of desk time and I was able to start making sense of things. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; it’s that I’ve been writing too much without enough time to make anything coherent among the overwhelm of scrappy thoughts in all the different situations. It’s such a mess to untangle.

I got sassy with the Lord yesterday and said, “If You’re still talking to me, couldn’t You just make it simple and give me a whole post all at once, instead of these bits and pieces of fourteen different articles and topics?”

Instead of striking me with lightning – or sending me to my room, which honestly I would’ve loved – He said, Because you’re not living out one article or topic. You’re in the middle of many situations, and I’m speaking to you through all of them.

Sit with Me, and we’ll sort them out together.

And then He sent me to my room, and we started sorting.

He showed me the juxtaposition of taking classes when it seems like there’s less time than ever, and of living on the far side of Wasilla when so much of our life is centered across the Valley. Both situations seem so inefficient, such bad timing.

But the classes have been my therapeutic distraction; I can pour myself into them because it’s surprisingly easier to grasp Old Testament theology and the Intertestamental Period than all the feelings swarming me. And our physical distance away from everything has enforced a boundary that keeps us (me) from overdoing anything else right now.

Sometimes our “inefficient” limitations protect us, because they make us focus, and create boundaries we wouldn’t have enforced on our own.

A while back we were in relationship with someone who was in crisis, and I was so frustrated that we weren’t able to do more for them. We did what we could, though. And after several months, it turned out that person still hadn’t done what they could to improve their own situation. Had we done more – had we done what we wished we could’ve in the beginning – we would’ve been stuck in a complicated enabling relationship, rather than setting the simple boundaries we were already limited by.

That was a good (but hard) lesson, and perspective I needed.

My internet search history lately has been saturated with stages of dementia, long term care, in-home care, insurance claims, real estate, housing markets, assisted living facilities, guardianship, cost of vehicles. The details are new but the pattern is familiar and I know life is being upended again.

Since I think I know some of what’s coming, part of me wants to hold tightly to the small, sacred routines for dear life. Another part of me has had no choice but to let go and accept things – especially the long grief of dementia, where there is no long term solution, no long term plan, no long term anything. Time is flying, and in so many ways, in so many moments, we have already lost her.

We already miss her, who she really is.

Until this year her mind has been like a summer sky with small white clouds occasionally moving across and blotting out the light of the sun. Each year the sky has become cloudier; there have been fewer periods of sunlight. This summer the sunlight in the sky of my mother’s mind, when it shines at all, glimmers through cloud.

– Madeleine L’Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

Here, it is steady snowfall, a run-on sentence of the accumulated questions whose answers are no longer remembered.

When I realized I was crying every day, I tried to make sense of the grief. We are used to change, and we have been losing her for so long, so it’s not exactly the speed or overwhelm of the world spinning too fast. Those are hard, but they are at least a familiar kind of hard.

It’s more like the world suddenly stops – she forgets Kav’s name, or she looks at me vacantly and I wonder if she’s already gone – and the momentum stops, everything stops.

We don’t notice oxygen until we can’t breathe. We don’t notice the speed of the earth turning until the axis wobbles, and I feel nausea as the fluid within me reels.

Later at the computer, I am trying to type through tears and think, I do not have time for this, there is so much to do.

If I do not sit here and grieve, though, nothing else will happen. This is the slow work, the deep work, that has to be done. If I don’t do it here, now, I won’t be able to do what needs done later, at her house, with the family, cleaning her stovetop, kneeling at her chair, holding her hand, drinking tea out of my dad’s mug.

This is the place and time to process, and there is no checking it off the list because it just keeps coming, and I hate that.

A couple years ago I wrote about a different grief, when kids grow up and move out. Reading it hits differently right now:

We miss their presence when they leave. But also, as they’ve been longing to leave – which we remember and relate to and rejoice in with them – we realize that we’ve already been missing them because part of them has been gone for a long time. They’ve changed and emotionally moved on already in many ways. The grief has been sneaking up on us, slipping in and surprising us at random intervals for over a year now.

During those recent weeks when I couldn’t make heads or tails of things, I went to the memorial service of a pastor from our previous church. He had led our team of intercessors, and every Tuesday morning we prayed around the table together. His wisdom bled into several of my writings.

He was in his eighties when he died, twelve years younger than my grandma. I could not help sitting through his service with her on my mind.

Even though the denominations are different, in many ways that church took me back to my roots because the atmosphere was so similar to Grandma’s church that I grew up in. We sang hymns in both places, including the one that opened Dr. Don’s memorial:

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

– Joseph Scriven, 1855

Person after person came up to honor this man, and they were still going when I had to leave early for another event at our church that evening. A couple people mentioned this quote of his:

The definition of true humility is to be known for who you really are.

– Dr. Don Brendtro

Doesn’t that change how we see authenticity, relationships, boundaries, and humility?

We feel helpless and without words sometimes, stuck in our own limitations and bound by the time it takes all the tears to flow out of us. But God is working in all of our weakness, making us who we really are, and teaching us to be honest about it with those around us.

We’ve had enough of society telling us to fake it until we make it. We are building a Kingdom of people who live humbly and honestly, even when life is a mess of griefs and burdens.

We are not performing; we are becoming.

There are reasons for the irony of our seasons. Protection is in place, timing is at play. And even though I’m scouring real estate listings more often than some people check their social media feeds (cough), I understand why the answer is still “Wait, not yet.” God has a curriculum for our lives, and we do not plan it.

Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.

He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

– Deuteronomy 8:2-3

I have seen Him move us in perfect timing, when that perfect timing took years longer than I wanted. He moved us to the perfect place, when that perfect place was rejected by us at first because it didn’t fit what we thought we wanted and needed.

He gave it to us anyway, and we are aching a little at the prospect of leaving it, whenever that time comes.

Sometimes He is preparing us in ways that look like the opposite of preparation. Sometimes He is protecting us (and others) through our inability, our lack of proximity, or other boundaries we never would’ve enforced on our own.

That doesn’t mean we’re not called to those abilities or proximities, or that we won’t get there eventually.

It means He’s taking us the long way, and it’s for our good.

P.S. You can read our March ministry and family update here.