Choices

Retread is in a few weeks.  It's like our journey home.  We left seminary three years ago and this was on the horizon.  What will it be like in 3 years when we come back?  Here it is.  What an amazing journey it's been.  I will happily spend my week with the boys running all over my old town while my hubby does continuing education stuff.  I have my baby sitter lined up for some much needed girl time (of the pastor's wife variety).  And I've also been thinking a lot.  My thoughts keep returning to the "if I had known then what I know now" mentality.  What if I would have known how God would work in these last 3 years.

I have a choice.  (Well, lots of them).  In the past, the retread spouses have met with the current student spouses to talk.  I went every year.  It was basically the same thing, just always presented in a different way.  I have a choice in how I present my information.  I can be down and make sure to mention all of the things that haven't gone right.  Or, I can present a balance.  Life isn't perfect...anywhere.  It's not going to be perfect no matter where you are called.  I want to make a choice to present the good and the tough.  I want to show how God has truly shaped me and made me even better.  How God has taken what didn't start out like I thought and turned it into something so amazing!

We wanted to go back to Nebraska so bad.  God was calling us to Nebraska.  It was my home and it was my hubby's home after his parents moved while he was in college.  Someone at the synod office even told us we'd have no problem going back there.  How was it that we ended up in southwest Minnesota?  I had every emotion.  We would stay a few years and go home.  Then I'd say we're never going back they lied to us.  Then my choice came and I decided on the adventure.  God has called us here.  Right here to this recliner looking out this window at the trees blowing in the Minnesota sunshine.  We may never leave southwest Minnesota, but that's up to God and we will take the adventure as it comes.

Looking out the window into the beautiful Minnesota spring!

It's like Chutes and Ladders these choices.  Each square reminding me we all serve a Living God.  Little squares like my MOPS group, my circle at church, my bible study ladies, our doctor, the school system, my girlfriends, the personality of this congregation, the guy fixing my dishwasher (in one day...).  The chutes like living so far from family, living so far from the grocery store, sometimes living in the pastor fish bowl, the phone calls, the hospital visits, the late nights alone.  But in the end the squares I land on do not always send me down the chute. Mostly they send me up the ladder or to the next square where I encounter this Living God.  A Living God who has blessed me.  The journey may have been rough in certain spots (mostly from my own doing) but I would not go back and change it.  I can't change it because then the changes I've made to myself would not make me who I am today.  My only choice now is to continue to follow the Living God who blesses me over and over and walks with me.