I’ll Take It: Walking Through Doors Without a Plan

I accepted a job last week. I wasn’t actively looking for one, and it’s very part time but it seemed like an ideal opportunity, at least how it fits into our family lifestyle. I usually like to have a plan for the next step of my life. But what the last year as taught me is that you can’t plan too far ahead, because things have a way of being very different than you expect.

In the last two years we’ve moved house, become landlords, gotten a dream job, lost a dream job, been unemployed, been self-employed, had a child diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, had two children evaluated with neuropsyche testing and dealt with the resulted diagnoses, enrolled our kids in school, pulled them out of school (after said job loss and we couldn’t afford the tuition), and sold a house. There have been spiritual struggles, existential crises, new medical terminology to learn, new diets to adopt, new medications, therapy (oh so much therapy, of all kinds) and a lot of stress. The kind of stress that makes you want to avoid getting up in the morning so you can just pretend for a few moments longer that your life resembles anything like normal.

All that to say, I don’t think about the future as much as I used to. I used to obsess over when we would be free of some of the struggles we deal with daily, but I don’t anymore, or at least not as often. Because I realized that things happen when they happen.

I had talked about going back to work part time for years, and I have occasionally, but only for limited periods of time where it worked for our family situation. I have actively looked for jobs and I have had jobs practically come to me.

I now work two part time jobs (those are the ones that pay money, not counting the church ministry work, homeschooling my children, teaching at our co-op, writing and blogging). But the reason I decided to take them on was because they were a good fit for our family and seem to dovetail nicely into our lifestyle. Yes, they take up my time and energy, but they don’t take away from the things that are my highest priority.

Sometimes God opens a door, and it’s clearly the right thing. Sometimes it’s something we’ve been working hard for, or it can be completely unexpected. But it still takes courage. I’m not really concerned about where I’ll be a year or two or ten from now. Yes, I have goals and dreams. I’m doing the best I can to make those happen. But I also know that my life changes frequently, almost daily it seems, and usually when I’m least expecting it. So I’ll continue to make those plans in metaphorical pencil and move forward. This door is open, I’m walking through it.