On a More Personal Note

When my now-husband-Dave and I got engaged, we had a long-distance relationship. Boy, was it long distance! He lived in Baton Route, LA, and I lived in Atlanta. And yet, here we are together, happily married and living in my hometown, a smallish place a couple of hours from Atlanta. Here's the amazing part. Although having both Dave and my family all in one place was one of the desires of my heart, I did absolutely nothing to arrange it.

When we got engaged, we didn't know for sure where we would be living, but Dave was able to get a transfer to Atlanta and we lived there for about 10 years. That was fabulous, but it gets better. He became interested in another job in his organization--sort of a one-man office that served a large part of the state. The job would require a move to a small town in the northern part of Georgia. I said that if he managed to get the job, I would move there, but I wasn't particularly excited about it. I would be a little further away from my family, away from my Atlanta friends, and would miss out on a lot of the fun things Atlanta has to offer.

Still, I was ready for a change. I had recently made a career move that wasn't making me particularly happy. In fact, I had gone from a small mom-and-pop firm that was like family to a huge, stressful, tense corporate environment. At the end of a day at that place, I would often be at the point of tears. That year, God kept bringing me over and over to Psalm 126, and these verses would jump out at me as though God were speaking them right into my ear:

"Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him." (v. 5-6, NIV)

Psalm 126 is about people in bondage being set free, and returning to their homeland. Every time I read it, I felt God was assuring me he was going to release me from that job and bring me to something better. But I had no idea just how literal his promise to me was. Dave put his application in for the new job--and we discovered that the one-man office was being moved from the small town in north Georgia...to my home town! When I found that out, I could feel God smiling down on me, as though saying, "See, I told you!"

Of course, like David in yesterday's post, even while God was behind the scenes working all this out, I had occasion to wonder if anything was ever going to happen. Particularly when, after it seemed that Dave had the job, we were notified that the position was being abolished and it seemed that everything had fallen through. But then, a few weeks later, everything fell back into place. They managed to keep the position, and Dave got the job.

So here we are, seven years later. And these have been seven of the best years of my life, with Dave and my parents and sister and my nice little town all here together. Some days, when things aren't so wonderful, I try to remind myself of what God has done. Because if I had TRIED with all my heart and energy to arrange all this, I would have gotten nowhere. But God had no problem with it at all.