New Year, No Clue

Can I tell you the story of how God takes care of us when the tracks of what we thought was our life trajectory just came to an abrupt end and we're feeling derailed?

I hope so. I don't know what it is yet. But I hope to tell you that story.

Our 2023 Christmas season began like a holiday movie trope. One minute we're buying gifts and decorating mantels, and the next we find out Dad is being laid off his job (we found out Nov. 30 that it was happening Jan. 2). 

While we don't put our trust in horses or chariots or institutions (and increasingly not this one), and the season of Advent and Christmas brought constant reminders that great light comes in the darkness, that gifts comes in the most unexpected ways, that God is present with us, and that all our hopes and fears are met in His faithfulness, we are still human and we felt--initially, throughout the season, and feel still--the weight and the sting of this decision, of its timing and its reverberations.

And like movie tropes, we get real tired of recurring storylines and would like something more original. We'd also like that Christmas miracle that always comes after the trope...but we're nine days into the new year, and waking up to manna every day, learning once again and still to trust God's provision whether it comes in a huge miracle or a series of small, daily ones.

We started the new year without the heart to celebrate our 15th anniversary, which fell the day after the job ended. That celebration will have to wait 'til we feel like it. Also, I am still employed with the same team which laid off my husband, which is one of the most awkward situations I've ever found myself in. But it seems foolish to give this up until I have something else secured.

It's funny to me that of our two huge crises of 2023 (a record blizzard in Feb/March of 99" of snow over seven days and a layoff in Nov) that it's the first one that's ministering to me in the second one. I keep running the scenario in my head of us day by day taking our meager shovels and trying to make progress on our driveway in the blizzard. For several days in a row, we actually were digging out what we'd done the day before. Eventually, the snow stopped falling and we were slowly progressing from the house to the road. 

We have about 100' driveway that ascends from the main road to our house, with two neighbors sharing the driveway on either side, and a neighbor just next to us who uses a different access. None of the neighbors were home, all got stuck down the mountain during the catastrophe, and so sometimes it was one of us, sometimes it was all four of us, shovels in hand, chipping away at the largess, but with no outside help whatsoever. We were utterly surrounded by snow and completely stuck at our home, and hand-shoveling was our only hope as the snowblower is no use at that depth. It broke up the monotony of staying inside, and it was good exercise, but it was also very overwhelming and demoralizing, and we maybe had progressed 10' to 15' after a week, trying to create forward progress, but also a width that could fit a car through, in the hopes that one day we would drive out of there again.

Then one day, as we were digging, a volunteer with a snow plow saw us and, just out of the goodness of his heart, began plowing our driveway from the road end. In about 15 minutes, he had cleared what could easily have taken us another week by hand...maybe even two. It was a blizzard miracle. We had no expectation of help, and certainly not of that magnitude. The main roads were the priority for the state workers and you'd certainly have to pay if you wanted private help, if it could even get to you. But volunteers with equipment had begun to ascend our devastated mountain, many from different states, and there we were, diligently shoveling, and he saw us and poured out his gas-powered grace upon us, and carved out a pathway to freedom for us. 

So I keep remembering the despair and exhaustion we felt...and then the miraculous appearance of the snow plow.

And here we are again, overwhelmed by circumstances we can't control, and every day we wake up and get ourselves out of bed no matter how much we want to. Sometimes we feel hopeful and feisty and determined, and sometimes we are utterly seized by the fear and the injustice. All we can do is what is right in front of us. We look at job sites (but if we start to feel crushed, we stop). We send out our resumes. We recite His promises to ourselves. We do the work, the next right thing. We chip away with our shovels, grateful for those who have been generous and thoughtful and who are faithfully praying alongside us. And we wait and hope for the snow plow, if it will come.

I don't know the story yet. I do know these words, my default prayer: The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want.

I shall not want? But I do want. I want a lot of things. (Foremost, for Christian academia to wake up and give my very talented husband a teaching position in which he would absolutely thrive and be a tremendous blessing to his students.)

He promises that I shall not want. I lack nothing. I have everything I need. He is always with me and everything He has is mine, if I'd just stop comparing myself to the prodigals and see that.

I don't know the story yet. I hope I can tell it to you. 

For now, it's the story of the Israelites in the wilderness waking up to manna. 

I want to hoard the manna. I just want a big fat bank account of manna and I don't ever have to wonder if the check will bounce. But there are rules for the manna. You have to collect it and then let it go, because the whole point is learning to trust that it will be there tomorrow.