End Game...

Funny when you realize the dream wasn't ever really the dream...

What do you want?  What will make you happy? 

These are questions that have been bouncing around in my heart for quite some time now.  Sometimes it's my husband asking, because he is this legitimately amazing person who would actually move heaven and earth to purchase, do, be, make happen whatever it is that I want, if it is within his power to do so, and sometimes even if it's not.  I'm not sure how many dads look at their future sons-in-law and say, "Good luck with this one," but mine did.  I am high maintenance... apparently...

But more often than not, these questions have been internal.  I have been asking them myself.  And I haven't been able to come up with very good answers, if I'm honest, which I try to be.  But there is a common theme.  Over and over and over again, I have said that what I want, what would make me happy, is stability.  And I really believed it.  But then I lived through the past 19 months...

In October of 2013, I was thrilled to be going "home".  After a 12 year journey that took us through 5 states, 9 houses, 6 churches, and more heartbreak than I ever thought I could live through, we were finally going to have that "moment" when you realize that God really loves you and has set aside this particular second in history just for you, to show you how everything has worked together for good, how it was all necessary to bring you to the specific place for which you were born.  Breathe in, breathe out, the trouble is over, the years that the locusts ate are finished, you can stop wandering around in the desert, because this is why you were created.  You... have... arrived.

It was the dream.  This was everything I ever wanted... in 1997.

Here we were moving into a little house just yards away from the first home we ever owned, from the house we walked away from in 2001 to begin this adventure.  That house long since burned to the ground, but this one is eerily similar to such a point that I sometimes forget the dining room, laundry room, and master bedroom are not the ones from the original house.  This is what our lives would have looked like if we'd lived in the same house all these years...

Here we were taking a staff position at a church that is small, but not too small, that has a calendar with no space for another event, that has blended worship and canned music and a youth group and children's programming for the kids.  This is what our lives would have looked like if we had landed the elusive youth pastorate at a desirable church all those years ago and just hung on...

If Phil had become a course of study guy, trading an extensive education for ordination the quick and easy way, never questioning, never learning new things...

If I had avoided school altogether, settling in with the homesteading families and living under the umbrella of submission, never really seeking the call God had for my life... 

If the kids had embraced the safety of mediocrity instead of flourishing in their spiritual formation and talents, missing out on the beauty of nonconformity...

We could have done it, too.  We could have been those people.  But we never would have been us.  And chances are pretty good we wouldn't have known you.  Yes, you, particularly if you are one of the hundreds upon hundreds of people we met because of the choices we made over those 12 years.  What a loss... for us... for you... for the world... for the Kingdom...

What I wanted at 17 is not what I want at 35.  Let me be clear.  I don't want this.  I don't want this, but I am so thankful that God allowed us to experience it, because I might have spent my entire life wishing for something I didn't want if these months hadn't played out like they have.  I don't want this, and I know now that it's not what we were created for.  I don't want this, I was wrong, and it's OK.

May I return, briefly, to these haunting words that have changed my life forever?  "A cloud of missed possibilities envelops every beginning: it is always this beginning, this universe, and not some other. Decision lacks innocence. Around its narrations gather histories of grievance: what possibilities were excluded?" (Keller, 2003, 160).  Oh, friends, there are possibilities that were excluded, but I am less and less convinced that histories of grievance are worth grieving, for had we made different decisions, had we chosen a different beginning, a different universe, we would be grieving you.  We would be grieving us.

I don't have to wonder anymore.  I have seen things in the past few months that most people never get to see.  Sometimes I feel a little bit like I am in The Twilight Zone, or maybe I'm George Bailey, because I honestly believe I have been given the opportunity to see what life would have looked like if we'd made different choices.  There are still moments of letting go that are difficult, but overall I know we did what was right.  There's no staying here, though.  Turn page, time for another adventure...

L.