It was a year and a half ago that I discovered my life was not going to continue on in its happy, stress-free pattern.
My husband, two-month-old daughter, and I all laid on our queen-sized bed and cried.
With most of a doctoral degree behind him, my husband still could not even get an interview at any of the many colleges he’d applied to work at. This was something I had never even considered as a possibility. When people asked me what we would do after he graduated, I always said we would go wherever he could find a teaching job. I would stay at home with our daughter and any future children after he had a full-time job. I’d be a happy professor’s wife, charming fellow academic folk with my lovely housekeeping, gorgeous meals, and charming children.
January 2009 forced us to face the fact that we couldn’t plan out life to our specifications. Having just returned to work after a ten-week maternity leave, I continued to work full-time without knowing when I’d be able to quit, despite the fact that I’d informed anyone who would listen I’d be out of there in July. I dropped my baby at daycare, not knowing when I’d be able to fulfill my heart’s desire to be at home with her.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12
I spent most of last winter panicking, trying to control my husband, and feeling sick over the future. We concocted a million different plans, the most sensible seeming to be that my husband would find a job teaching high school in Nashville, where we lived, so that we could stay in our house a few more years and he could get some experience. In two or three years, he would reapply to colleges.
He had one interview in Nashville and was quickly rejected. I, who had built my hopes on that one position, crumbled.
Then in May, a quick turn of events landed my husband a job at a prestigious private school in Chattanooga, just two hours from our current home. We put out house on the market and prepared for a move. We had no showings for the first two months.
To make a long story short, in August my husband moved to Chattanooga while my daughter and I stayed in Nashville. He’s been happier teaching high school than he’s ever been. On January 4, 2010, I was finally able to wake up to my last day of full-time work outside the home, and we moved to Chattanooga on January 12. Our house still hasn’t sold.
And yet, I wouldn’t give up this experience for anything. For in these impossible times, I’ve had to come up with a new plan: I have no plan. None. For the first time in my life, I am completely willing to let God do what He wants to do without piping in my opinion. Sure, I still want to at times. But in my heart of hearts I know that letting God lead is the only way to be truly fulfilled.
It’s a lesson I hope will never be far from my mind and my heart.
by Jessie Weaver, Vanderbilt Wife
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