Welcome back to the blog! It’s been a while and I’ll tell you why below. But first, I wanted to introduce you to my friend, Tabitha Allman of www.tabithaallman.com. She invited me to join her on her blog today to share about everything I’ve learned about resilience this year. I hope this segment will encourage you, as well as the blog post below. Definitely check out her blog to see the series she’s doing on resilience right now. It’s been such an encouragement to many. And feel free to comment on this post and tell me what you have learned this year! I’d love to continue learning together!
*Press play on the video below to join the conversation.*
This year has been a doozy for all of us. But when I say this has been the strangest year of my life, I couldn’t mean that more. So let me give you a rundown of what 2020 looked like for me:
November: My family visits Southern Illinois to discern if that was where God was leading us to move.
December: My family says yes, and we start planning to move and plant a church with two other families.
January: We meet and start to get to know the third family on our team.
February: I prepare to move out of my apartment in Chicago, but can’t tell my boss, my coworkers, or many of my friends yet.
March: I share the news with my boss right before we all start working remotely due to Covid. Chicago puts a shelter in place order into effect and I move out of the city to stay with friends while we wait to Covid to die down…lol….little did we know.
April: I end up staying out of Chicago longer than planned. Church goes digital. Our new church plant starts meeting on Zoom. I celebrate the strangest, most bittersweet Easter of my life. I can’t be with my family because of Covid.
May: I move out of my friend’s spare bedroom and begin packing up my apartment to move. I haven’t been to my apartment in over two months. So much had changed. I didn’t get to do any of the things I wanted to say goodbye to Chicago because they were all shut down. Race relations start to get heated and riots ensue in downtown Chicago.
June: I take several short trips to pack up my belongings at my apartment, but sleep on couches or mattresses on the floor at my parent’s house while they remodel to prepare the house to be sold. Covid is lasting longer than everyone expected and summer plans start to be canceled. I work my last week at my job.
July: I’m officially moved out of Chicago and staying with my family. I don’t know where my next paycheck will come from. I gain my first freelance writing client. Our house goes on the market and we accept an offer three days later. I drive to Nebraska to speak at a summer camp and visit my cousins.
August: I arrive home the day before we sell our house. We hurry to pack up and then say goodbye to the home I grew up in. We have no other house to go to, so we stay with friends before going to a church retreat. We say goodbye to everything we know and drive away from the church retreat and towards our new adventure. We move in with the Blocks, the family heading up our church plant. We live with 9 people in a 4 bedroom house. We search for houses and make an offer. The contract is supposed to close on September 21.
September: The 21st comes and goes. Complications arrive. Our house deal falls through. We have to start the house search over completely. We are discouraged and don’t know what God’s doing. We end up staying with the Blocks for much longer than planned. We find a new house, put in an offer and it gets accepted. The new close date isn’t until October 9th. I start a new job writing for the local small-town newspaper. My brother who just graduated high school gets a job that’s perfect for him. My two youngest brothers adjust to a new school that they’ve only ever attended virtually.
October: We finally move into our new house. It’s smaller than we had planned for, so we have to purge many of our belongings. I must transform a small sitting room with no light, no closet, and no door into a bedroom. We slowly start the process of unpacking. We special order a door and find out it won’t come in for almost another three months.
November: A girl I have discipled since she was in 6th grade moves five hours south to live near us. She’s 18 and starting her life learning how to flip houses. Seeing a friendly face brings such an unexpected joy to our family. My parent’s antique selling business picks up. They have two antique booths they are keeping up. My dad hasn’t had a job for almost two years. He searches and applies to dozens, but finds nothing. I travel to northern Wisconsin to speak at a retreat. We finally get a dining room table just in time for Thanksgiving. We reflect upon where we were last year, just starting this journey, traveling to Southern Illinois for the first time.
So much has changed in a year. So. Much.
A year ago, I never could have imagined wearing a mask everywhere I would go.
A year ago, I was trying to navigate how to tell my coworkers I would be moving….not how to deal with a global pandemic.
A year ago, I was excited for new adventures. This year I’m excited for a home to live in.
I lived out of a suitcase for 8 months.
I hopped around living situations so much that I didn’t hardly sleep in my own bed from March until October. I learned to bring an air mattress wherever I went.
I have now lived in a shared sleeping area or a bedroom without a door for four months.
I don’t share these trials to complain, but rather to be honest about how hard this year has been. When we said yes to God, we could not have imagined how many obstacles our family would come up against. And pile Covid restrictions and political unrest and racial division on top of that…and it becomes a really really hard and scary year.
But the reality is, I learned a LOT this year.
I learned that we are never promised a comfortable sleeping arrangement or a room with a door. We are never promised a nice house to live in or a calendar jam-packed with plans. We aren’t promised a family get-together for Thanksgiving, and we aren’t promised a 50 people gathering for Christmas. Any plan or routine could be disrupted at any moment.
But God stays the same.
All throughout history, people have faced wars and political unrest. They’ve seen countries fall and new ones begin. Pandemics have washed over the world’s population and droughts have left the lands dry. We cannot trust in the world, the government, the status quo, or our own routines to be our anchor. If we do, we will be washed away like a feather in a hurricane.
God is the only anchor we can cling to. He’s the only one who will not change. He’s the only one who promises to provide for his children and care for their needs.
And even Jesus, his own son, faced similar tragedies in his life on earth. He knew the stress of political unrest. The Jews had been overtaken by the Romans. They were being taxed so heavily it was making families starve. Jesus knew what it meant to move from place to place…having no consistent bed to sleep in and no consistent routine. His routine was to do the will of the Father. His agenda was to go when the Father said to go and stay when He said to stay. His objective was to build relationships with people wherever he went and to speak truth into a very unstable world.
The reality that there’s nothing new under the sun comforts me. Because that very sentiment means that no matter what war or world disaster arrises next, I serve a God who is trustworthy and steadfast in the midst of it all. I can breathe deeply because I am in him. So no matter what horrible tragedy comes next…He is my rock, my norm, my status quo, my routine, and my comfort. He is my anchor in the storm. And after a year like 2020, that sentiment holds a whole new weight.
