Once we arrived back in Iowa, the next few months were a blur.   Jeff applied to Delta Connection Academy, in spite of recruiter’s advice, and was accepted.  He would start training in the fall, in the meantime the pastor of the church where we worked was leaving, and that left us with minimal options about where to live and a limited timeline.  Honestly, Iowa had turned out to be a wonderful place and we were going to miss it,

We were facing many decisions, and we had no idea where to begin.  I mean, how do you start over in every single way? A new place to live, a new career, new schools for the kids, and so many other unanswered questions.  Well-meaning people would ask us about our plans, and we would stammer for an answer, we didn’t want to seem like everything was as out of our control, but, wow, it really was.  Looking back, I don’t know why having the “right” answers” mattered, perhaps because we were young and already felt so inadequate. We’ve never really done things conventionally, hence the title of this story. But we never thought of ourselves that way, we just wanted to walk through every open door and say yes to as many opportunities as possible. 

And that’s what we did.

But, that can be hard to explain to the people in your life.

I was a little disheartened (at the time) with how fellow believers responded to our plans, or lack of plans, depending on how you look at it.   I didn’t know how to explain all of my feelings back then, I am going to attempt now.  Hopefully, with fifty plus years of experience to help me, I can express how it felt.   When Jeff was still in college, we thought he’d be a teacher.  It wasn’t meant to be for him for many reasons, but when the church offered him a job, it felt right as I’ve chronicled for you in the last eight blogs.   As much as we loved working with the teens and leading the choirs, something inside of us never felt quite settled.  Like something was missing.  Trying to explain this back then was impossible.   It seemed ungrateful to say such a thing after all the opportunities we’d been given. It wasn’t that we weren’t thankful, we just felt like there was something different ahead for us.  The years we spent in ministry were EXACTLY where we were supposed to be at the time, but, for us, it wasn’t meant to be forever.  We had many people ask us how we could leave ministry; wasn’t it a lifetime calling?  Hmmm, that’s an interesting question.  I would counter wherever we are, and whatever we’re doing, that is our ministry.  Whether we work full time in the church or fly airplanes, we can serve God and others through our daily work. To feel like we were letting people down by leaving one vocation for another was so hard for me, because at my core I long for approval.  This is something the Lord has had to slowly walk me out of, and he’s done it largely by leading us to live our lives in a way that doesn’t always make sense.   By that I mean, we stepped out in faith not knowing the plan, not having income, not having benefits, not having any of the societal norms, and people had a hard time celebrating that with us.  I want to say that they cared deeply and didn’t want to see us make a grave mistake, but it felt more like they thought we were irresponsible.  Obviously, not everyone; there were some who celebrated with us and encouraged us to step out into the adventure.  At this point, when I think back on it, I wish I had held on more tightly to what I KNEW God was doing in our lives and less on needing others to approve.   But, alas, we do the best we can with what we have at the time.  What’s that saying, “we do better when we know better.”   I am forever grateful to those who spoke in private to us, who encouraged us in the Word and reminded us that God takes care of us. I would hold on tightly to those promises in the days ahead.

A word of advice I offer humbly, our words of support and prayers mean so much more than our opinions and fears.  Believe in people and trust God to work it out for them, he really is in control.

The wheels to our flight had barely touched down when Jeff began making phone calls, so much of what we were doing relied on him because I was busy with our three kids.   He called apartments around the Sanford, FL area trying to find one we could afford.  I was planning to go to work, because our youngest was starting school that fall.  We just had to get through the summer. One of the very first things we did was put our house on the market.  We listed it and sold it ourselves trying to save every single penny because we knew there were going to be lean months (years) ahead.   Jeff made all the advertisements, he’d learned how to do this by designing t shirts and coffee mugs for our youth groups.  We hosted a few open houses on our own. We finally sold our house to a nice lady who had a son in high school, she was thrilled with the location.

And then it was time, we loaded our moving truck, with some help from church members, and set our GPS to Florida.  Just kidding, of course there was no GPS then, but my map enthusiast husband always had a large atlas in the van.  Anybody else have one of those?  We mapped our trip and pulled out of the driveway and headed south.  It was a very emotional time for so many of the reasons I’ve told you, and also because we’d made friends there and we would miss them.   Abbie was buckled in the moving truck with her Daddy and the boys were with me in the green van.  And so, we began our journey. This journey wasn’t just about traveling miles, but realizing sometimes the best paths are the ones you never saw coming.

Before we could go to Florida, we had to make a pit stop.

Back to Alabama.

We definitely never saw that coming.