Still in the middle of selling our house.

The inspector has come.

The appraiser has come.

The termite guy comes next week.

What I need now is a good psychiatrist.

Maybe she’ll come next week too.

I told my realtor selling a house is not for the faint of heart, she readily agreed.

We’ve packed up belongings that hold more memories than my heart can bear.  I cry at the least little thing these days. For example, we pulled out an old box from our overly packed garage, which I am sure is a fire hazard, by the way.  In this box were little scarves and small gloves with matching hats.  They were neatly packed just the way I’d left them fifteen years ago when we loaded up all our earthly belongings and headed south from Iowa.

Each and every glove, hat, and scarf I touched brought back a collage of memories. Squeals of running and catching snowflakes. Rolling a snowball until it was big enough to be a snowman. Red cheeks and runny noses; proof we’d been making the most of a snowy winter. I closed my eyes and I could see small faces sitting around our modest table sipping hot chocolate cooled by too many marshmallows.

How was I supposed to pack this stuff up in a black garbage bag and give it to Goodwill?!?!

A time capsule of our life, how could I cast it aside? Ugh!  Packing is hard.

“Get excited,” friends tell me. “Don’t look back, keep going forward,” I tell myself. But no matter which way I look I see life coming and going like a train passing. I think I understand mid-life crisis. It’s the slow realization that YOUR LIFE is MORE than half gone.  I’m not trying to be dismal and I’m certainly not trying to be a negative nanny.

I am trying to tell you I AM IN MID LIFE CRISIS AND I AM NOT OKAY.

Send help.  Preferably with a cheese tray. Okay, so that may be a little bit exaggerative, but you get my point.

The Bible says we get three score and ten years on this earth. You know what that means?  If you do, kudos, I didn’t know until a couple years ago.  What’s up with “score” anyway? Three score and ten actually means, in Bible language, about seventy years. We get about seventy years, some of us will get more, some less. But seventy is the average.

I’ve spent a long time thinking over how I want to spend this next half of my life. I’ve always said I want to make a difference, I want to leave a legacy.  But, that’s hard to see right now amidst the boxes crowding my view.

These next few weeks are going to be crazy as we continue to pack our lives into cardboard and haul it across the country. But, in the middle of it all, I want to continue to ask the Lord what is next for me.

I quit my beloved job of thirteen years, well, I still have a week or so of training my replacement ahead. But, for all practical purposes, I’m unemployed. First time since I can remember.

So many endings. Can somebody send help?!

I don’t know, bring coffee or donuts or something to help me cope with all of this change. And if you do bring those donuts or coffee, please say a prayer for me and my family on your way.

I’m not quite ready to be excited about all of this because I’m constantly looking back.

That’s what packing does for you, it forces you to remember and in the remembering we’re reminded of God’s abounding goodness, even if it does lead us to tears.

So maybe there’s a little good in the chaos of it all.

Thankfully, because I’ve lived a number of my days already, I KNOW the Lord is walking down memory lane with me.  He sees my tears, the Bible tells me he saves them in a bottle.  Isn’t that sweet? I love the idea of his mercy over me. He knows the loss I’ve suffered over the last four and half years, and now a major life change.

And, even though I have no idea what’s next, I KNOW I’m not alone.

I have one thousand boxes and the Lord Jesus right by my side.

“You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.”   Psalm 56:8