Several years ago, my daughter and son in law began looking for a home for themselves and their family of three children. They had outgrown their little starter home over the years and with the addition of more children, more toys, and more worldly possessions, the walls started closing in around them. Looking for a new home had become a necessity, not a luxury.
I was single at the time, lived in the home where I had raised my daughter after divorce, and was as settled in as a hibernating bear. My rhythm of days, weeks and months had emerged and there was soon an almost spiritual sense of ease for me there. I knew pretty much where everything was in the home, having lived there so long and it was no feat to lay my hand on anything I needed, even in the attic, within record time if retrieval was required. Since the day I moved in around 1993, the utensil drawer was under the counter where the microwave sat. There was a small junk drawer near the fridge containing a messy mixture of small tools, garage door openers, bits of this and scraps of that, keys that matched “something” and random screws, washers, nuts and bolts in a beat up box. Next to it was a drawer of herb informational manuals, canning books (I had not canned in years by this time), a few old recipes, parts to a Vitamixer used during my catering days, and a manual for a bread machine I no longer owned…but it had good recipes in it, so it made the cut. I will insert here, I no longer cooked to speak of due to my singleness.
Cabinets next to sink were for dinnerware and glasses, and flatware? Underneath that cabinet of course to ease the Thanksgiving and Christmas family gatherings both in the setting of tables, and washing and putting away of the clean dishes afterwards. It had always stayed the same, never varied, for over 20 years. And now I was offering to break the synching of my surroundings and develop a rhythm with 5 other people. I offered the short term solution of helping them liquidate their home, pack up and come live in my home a short time while searching for new digs, and then planned to help them re-establish elsewhere under their own new roof as I went back handily without much interruption to my own years old rhythm. But God had other plans.
My children and grandchildren stayed in my home with me for 4 rather unsynched years. During this time there were many struggles, both concerning the squeezing of bodies into my 1900 square foot home, along with all the possessions necessary to the raising of children and homeschooling, 4 vehicles, tools, lawn care equipment and everything else you can imagine and maneuvering the normal struggles of combining 2 families with different ideas and philosophies of life to a great degree. My daughter, by default, did most of the cooking in that home during their tenure, so she rearranged the kitchen, with my permission of course, to suit her cooking style and needs. With such a large family, preparatory ingredients were crammed into every available space, sippie cups and plastic items replaced my dinnerware, corn flakes and 25 pound bags of organic flour and rice were shoved under the buffet in the kitchen. The laundry room cabinets held an assortment of light bulbs and washing powders and such as always, but also embraced an invasion of back stock of juices, snacks for the allergy-impaired grandchild, and containers of shelf stable soy milk. We worked around a day sleeping Daddy during those years, constantly hushing children, daughter always having to remember to get her clothing and necessities for the day out of the bedroom before Dad went to sleep so as not to disturb him during the day. Little things…all little microscopic things…added up to a big deal if we forgot the pattern of life and neglected to sync up all the players in this drama.
I had my space which included the master bedroom and bath. I sold furniture, downsized what I had and relocated my office there often replete with all kinds of grubby boxes full of trinkets I dragged in daily as I was selling on ebay. I made you tube videos there when day sleeper was up and baby #4 wasn’t asleep (she arrived in the midst of this chaos). The bewitching hour was between 3:30 and 6 when this could take place, but bath time conducted right next to my room for the big kids overlapped this time frame, so that added to the background noise in my videos. I learned to just throw out the disclaimer “my grandchildren live with me, you may hear them” and plow on. I trained my audience as I trained myself, to sync with the current wild rhythm of those living with me.
Somehow during all this turmoil and craziness, we decided we liked living together and began talking about moving to a larger home together if we could locate one with an apartment or mother-in-law’s wing so I could have privacy but we could all be available to each other as needed. We listed my home, and it sold within 3 days, with the stipulation of us clearing out within a 3 week period of time. We had not yet located a new home, although we had looked a bit. Appropriate living conditions were scarce especially in the case of a proposed separate space for me. I saw my many years home going away (I had signed the contract which was a full price offer, a no brainer), we had no interim housing to be found for a family as large as ours, and we had no new place to go. The nomad lifestyle was beginning to look a bit grim. I began to doubt the overall plan and its wisdom. I was frightened by the feelings I was having of my old safe place of life being torn asunder from my control and my spiraling off into the unknown abyss of who knows what. While we were packing for a life change I was beginning to doubt heavily, we all fell sick, one after the other, with a mysterious condition that slammed us to the mat and stopped all movement for days on end. Packing chores were slowed, the two estate sales we had planned were conducted by a sheer miracle in between the sicknesses, son in law could only help on weekends due to his work. We also had a myriad of issues with plumbing, a broken garage door, and car repairs, and I am sure a lot of things that I have just blanked out on now. Looking back I can almost feel the moving anxiety creep up even when I read about that period of time. I felt out of sync, out of touch, and was fast running out of hope. But as with everything else in my life, God had plans to help me adjust and sync to my new normal in spite of my old fear of being out of the control of things. It was a big emotional timeline moment of “let go and let God”, and I had to trust Him with the process.
And when I let go, almost as quietly as a feather on a spring breeze, my soul began to sync with God’s plan, rather than mine. We all began to fall into sync from the oldest down to the baby. We found temporary accommodations at the Hilton. We located our dream home in a 48 hour period of selling my home. Our raw emotions began to heal, and we felt ourselves sync again with each other and our surroundings. We got packed, all things fell into a peaceful place, and now a year later we live in a perfect combination of privacy and easy availability to each other.
Now I spend my days working around GiGi’s bungalow, as the grandchildren dubbed it, or enjoying the playful antics of my grandchildren from the garage window where my business items have been relocated along with my office. The rest of the family lives in the main house and there is no more disturbing the sleep of either the adult or baby who both sleep through the sync of my daughter’s homeschooling and housewifely days around them. There is a peacefulness here, a joy, a thankfulness due to the synching of the souls that came together, pushed through difficulties and came out the other side pretty much unscathed and content.
We all fight God’s path to synching our lives with Him and His choices for us. In our relationships, jobs, or daily decisions, we find ourselves stepping away from our best because we try to control everything. We tether ourselves to what we believe we should be doing rather than deferring to the power of the Savior to give us who and what we need, when we need it. If what we see doesn’t fit the plan we had, we convince ourselves it is not valid, it is a distraction, it is not worthy of contemplation.
But we are so wrong. Divine interruptions sync us to our next moment.
When we see obstacles, God sees opportunities. When we see chaos, God sees comfort. When we see a disruption, God sees our innermost desires fulfilled. I had to allow for the total upheaval of my former life to realize it was no longer working for me, even though I really thought it was. It was all part of the grand plan for the move to be difficult to prepare for, so we could feel confident in the combining of homes and family later. It had to “not feel good” for a while, in order to feel perfect later. Un-synching from old beliefs and thoughts is like childbirth. Much are the pains of the labor, it gets messy, it feels scary and unplanned, and even a bit out of hand and un-synched for a while. But as we let God do His work, and we stay out of the way…the letting go of the ashes of our old life is ultimately and only where the synching beauty of our next journey can begin.
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