My Journey with Joshua

If you're someone who's been reading my blog but not necessarily talking to me on a daily basis, you might be under the impression that this process has been a bed of roses the last few weeks. We sold our house really fast, we're buying a beautiful new one... If you're anything like me, you might read the words on the screen in front of you and imagine that I have some luscious green grass growing here in these parts. But that's always only part of the story. Here's the rest.

We came home from Rochester exhausted but bouncing off the walls with excitement about our new house. At last, I felt like I had something to be excited about. The past few months have been emotionally draining: Greg has been gone more often than he's been here, there's a huge For Sale sign in the front yard of the house I thought I would be living in for the next twenty years, and every time I went to visit New York it was cold and gray and depressing. Greg had taken to calling the drive from Rochester to Pittsburgh the "trail of tears," because I would cry the whole way home after every visit.

Finally, a ray of sunshine was breaking through the dark clouds of the last few months. Our home had sold in five hours. We'd found a home we loved in Rochester and had a contract on it. I had visited a Christian homeschooling program while I'd been there and loved it, too.

Then, the bottom dropped out from under my feet last week, and I found myself in a freefall of fear.

On Monday night, my realtor called and told me the buyers of our home here in Pittsburgh had backed out of their contract. We were back at square one, it seemed.

As I was listening to her on the other line and trying to process what this all meant for us, I heard a sound from downstairs that terrified me. It wasn't an intruder. It wasn't the cry of an injured child. It was far worse, my friends. It was vomit.

Yep. Boys 1, 2, and 3 dropped like flies to a horrendous case of the stomach flu over the course of the next 24 hours. Greg was scheduled to be gone from Sunday afternoon through Friday night, and so busy with traveling and meetings that he could barely text, let alone help me figure out how to handle the house situation.

Given my history, I anticipated feeling despair. Sadly, that's often my knee-jerk reaction to adversity. But this time, it was different.

What I want to to tell you is that instead, filled with the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity, I simply rested in God's unfathomable peace and knew He would take care of everything in His way, in His timing.

The truth was, I found myself gripped with fear. I was so afraid of all that this might mean for our family. Would we have to put the house back on the market? Would we have to lower the price? Would we need to cancel the contract on our new home and continue this exhausting life with Daddy in one city and the rest of us in another, indefinitely? My stomach churned, and sleep was elusive.

So God reminded me of Joshua.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the story :-).