Wednesday, 16 July 2008

• God Told Us To Leave Our Home: A Journey of Faith, Pt. 1

  by mrs lily

  Washington is beyond a doubt a beautiful state, full of picturesque mountain ranges, lush green grass, and really good coffee that you never have to go far to get. I poured my life savings into the espresso stands along the way to work each day....okay maybe on my days off, too. It was lovely.

  I was, however, quite miserable. The Pacific Northwest is so unlike the places I had lived in before. They say it is always raining there, but that is only partially true. It usually only rains for a little while each day, the rest of the time it is generally overcast and perhaps misting or foggy (okay, I’m exaggerating a little, the sun “comes out” sometimes for a week at a time several times a year).

  I wanted to leave Washington almost the entire time I was there, but it was not until just over a year ago, near our first anniversary, that my husband and I both felt the Lord was stirring our hearts to move from what had become our home. The more we prayed for direction, the more certain we felt that the Lord was preparing us to leave Washington; however, our destination became less clear. Even before we got married we had talked about and both wanted to move back to Texas, where we met, but nothing was there for us that we knew of. We felt like we needed to trust the Lord to lead us wherever it was He wanted us to be. Maybe the Lord was just using the hope of Texas to get us moving. We knew only that we had to trust.

  Overall, people were surprisingly supportive of our decision to leave. Honestly, it was not the blatant “What are you thinking?!” responses that bothered me, it was those who seemed to not take us very seriously. We knew that the Lord was calling us to do this, but even several authority figures in our lives repeatedly said things like, “Well, now's the time to do it, while you’re young…” emphasizing words like "fun" and "adventure." I can tell you right now that not very many women have this huge desire to be homeless and have little but a modest suitcase, no certainty of income, or a for sure destination as if we could even afford to get there. It was fun and adventurous for a time, but I was pretty scared.

  With just enough money to pay any remaining bills we had before we left, we were left with hardly anything to travel on. I was sort of panicking. Every time we tried to save money, something completely random would come up and we’d be back where we started. Strangely, our hearts confirmed we were still to do this trip, but it had to be by faith.

  The night we shared with our church what we were preparing to do, a girl was having a fundraiser for her own mission trip. At the end of the night she felt led to give us a portion of what she had raised that night. We were so blessed and surprised, ready to put it into savings for our trip. Unbeknownst to us, we had miscalculated something in our bank account and that evening something went through that we weren’t expecting. What was given to us almost exactly equaled what had overdrawn and the overdraft fee. To us it was a reminder we couldn’t do this by ourselves, and God would take care of each of our needs at the perfect time.

  We spent our last two months in Washington weeding through our stuff, deciding what to sell or give away and what would fit in our car and was worth keeping.  I laugh at myself now because I had done this just over a year before when I moved from NC to Washington, a car full of almost nothing I have now. It’s amazing to me what I thought was important at that time. It just goes to show that things are just things...

  Anyway, we said goodbye to our home, family and friends, our car loaded up to the brim and bottom-heavy. We celebrated early and actually left Washington on our anniversary date. We planned to travel around and visit friends and family around the US for a couple weeks, maybe a month if need be…we even had a route we had planned to take, but well…it didn’t quite go as planned….

  To be continued....

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