Several months ago, I was crying in the dark auditorium that
had been my church for over seven years.
I’m not one to cry at church, but we were at the point in the
will-we-or-won’t-we process where it appeared pretty likely that the move was
actually going to happen. Our old house
was listed, the job had been accepted, and my mind was mentally checking off a
series of “lasts” in our home city. This is probably our last trip to the
zoo. This might be the last time we’ll
visit the trains at Museum Center. This
is probably the last time we’ll visit Summit Park. This, this, this. When you’re heading into the great
unknown, every “last” seems like pretty much the end of the world as you know
it, and my heart was wrapped up in the grieving.
The band was playing - no, rocking – an anthem called “You Make Me
Brave”: the theme song of two all-church Brave journeys, the song that played
while I walked on waves at the Brave experience, the song that spoke to me as I
tried to quit my teaching job to become a writer and raise my kids, the song
that took me to tears when I failed and headed back the work. And then there I was in that dark room,
quitting that teaching job (and the paycheck) whether I wanted to or not,
leaving the neighborhood I loved to head to a home we hadn’t found yet,
pondering a budget that scared me to death, and the tears spilled over. And
Your love, in wave after wave, crashes over me, crashes over me. For you are fur us. You are not against us. Champion of Heaven,
make a way for all to enter in. I
suppose it was His love crashing over me, but it felt a lot like fear. How would I leave this place that had become
my home? How would I thrive without this
community that had loved, empowered, and inspired me? I prayed for confirmation that we were
following God and not just pursuing foolish desires.
And then our old house sold.
And finally James found a new one. And I got a small job writing for a new local moms blog. And after a long month of waiting, the Simon family was together again,
with a lot more space. It is the perfect
house for us right now, with a horde of kids that play together on the
cul-de-sac all day long, but I still found fear. Did we
make a good investment? Is this the
right place for us? Can we make it on
one income? I prayed for
confirmation. And then the writing gig
exploded: three jobs in two months. I am
crazy busy and unsure how to manage it all, but after all those months I spent
chasing leads and looking for jobs, they all showed up when we swallowed
our fear and moved.
Eli takes a break with a new buddy. Doesn't everyone hang out in the middle of the cul-de-sac?
We went church hunting online and narrowed it down to three
choices. One was too far away, and we
couldn’t find the service times for another one because the website was
down. We found ourselves in a start-up
church at a YMCA, and everything felt…weird.
People were lovely. The kids had
fun. But it is hard not to play the
comparison game, and this was very different from what we were used to. I prayed for confirmation. Later that week, our neighbor told us that the
little start-up church we’d visited had bought the land immediately adjacent to
our subdivision. That…got our
attention.
We met the pastor and visited a small group. I tried to embrace different. I worried about how to handle tithing, since
we made a commitment at our old church and God confirmed it by opening up JUST
THAT AMOUNT of money in our budget. But
with a drastically smaller family budget and a new church with a church to
build, I couldn’t figure out what to do.
I wondered if we were doing the right thing…or what the right thing even
was. I felt that familiar longing for "home" and "comfort".
Today we went to church, and the worship leader announced
that he was going to teach us a new song.
You know where I’m going with this, right? You
make me brave, you make me brave. No
fear can hinder now the love that made a way.
And so there I was, in another dark room, this time an exercise room
serving as a temporary church space, tears running down my face again while the
band rocked it out. “The song is
following us,” I whispered to James. But
seriously, the music of Crossroads has ministered to my heart for so many
years. To find it – my favorite song, no
less – in our new space felt like a promise kept. And a new promise…of favor still to
come.
Bravery is not the absence of fear; it is the presence of
faith.
