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.

It is 82 degrees here in the South today, so my daughter piled all four grandlittles into the Mommy wagon and headed for the zoo. They homeschool, so you can do that. Work sheets came out as soon as they buckled in and math, language will be accomplished on the way to the zoo, then maybe Shakespeare by audio on the way home. Home education is all about working with what you have, when you have. In the end, homeschoolers are by far more socially adjusted in most cases having their experiences shared by people of all ages, and academically they give any institution a run for their money with results due to the one-on-one time and investment the parent/teacher is willing to make coupled with the way the student is taught in the way he or she needs to learn and not “by the book”.

The Memphis Zoo has changed a lot since I was a child. I have photos of myself sitting on the concrete animals outside of the rhino area, very low fences surrounding the exhibits that could easily be stepped over and conquered by any inquisitive 3 year old. The caged animals like lions and monkeys participated with their ticket paying captors, peering queerly as we pitched popcorn and other approved goodies into the cages, we in turn watching them sniff and eventually devour our offerings. Often you would see one or more of the animals in cages lumber past, never acknowledging the crowds, the food, nor the clamor for their attention. It was as if they had been desensitized to the life around them. It makes me wonder if it was due to their imposed surrounding more than their actual brute nature. Some had been brought to captivity, some had been born there, but both groups had succumbed to their fate. Of all the zoo’s exhibits, these were the least entertaining, least engaged, and least animated of the animals. They usually had the smallest crowds due to their uninviting nature.

We as people can easily become much like these sad ones. We allow ourselves to disentangle from society and even often family, friends and loved ones as we castrate our emotions, and go into self-protection mode if we ever experience a hurt. We wear the countenance of an unapproachable being long enough and others actually stop approaching. We have unwittingly but by design become an emotional eunuch in our cage of self protection.

God created the animals on the sixth day in the Bible, which is the same day Man was created, but animals were created first. They were to be food, perform biological duties like procreation within their species but eventually they would consume each other in an effort to remain on the planet. Even Man himself consumed the animals. The sole purpose of the life cycle of the animals was to live, procreate, die without any emotional investment or ties.

But Man had other purposes, among them to care for the planet, vegetation, wildlife. But when Woman and others appeared on the planet, Man’s job broadened to take charge of those under his care. They were to be fed, clothed after the Fall, sheltered, and loved. What was Man’s expected ROI (return on investment) for his care? Respect, honor, submission, and ideally a return of gratitude and love.

Many of us have grown up under the authority of emotionally distant parents or been involved in relationships that encouraged an air of emotional distance between us and another person. We quarantine ourselves off later in life as we imitate what we knew growing up, even though we didn’t like the emotional distance and ignoring of the basics that occurred in our primary relationships. We become emotional eunuchs, much like the animals….pacing back and forth, watching but never participating in any valuable way with anyone around us, or worse…flying under the radar so no one would notice us, reach out and make us interact in a socially edifying and building kind of way for either ourselves or others around us. We float through years and eat, sleep, drink…sometimes too much…just trying to survive to the end of our personal loneliness and pain. We don’t strive to deal with anything or anyone. We take no chances and encourage no conversations. We create faux protections against getting hurt if we happen to let the cloak slide and someone sees inside the real “us”.

Emotional eunuchs all have one common trait…they all live a starvation life by choice and call it fullness. Ironically, the world often sees them as full, content, accomplished, functioning humans because that is the exhibit emotional eunuchs invite others to attend. They pull the “correct” people into their own circle who are willing to buy that ticket, nothing more, nothing less. And many times a higher price is paid than first imagined.

God said, right before Eve was created, one of the most important statements in the Bible in my thinking, right next to verses about God’s gift of salvation. He said “ It is not good that Man should be alone.” Usually this is seen through the filter of the man/woman relationship, but I think it is broader than that. I believe it is simply we all need each other whether we think so or not. Emotional distance taught doesn’t need to be caught and carried on into our own lives. We can choose to break that cycle as a deep and lasting way to worship our God, care for our fellow man, and love ourselves as God commands when He admonishes to love our neighbors AS OURSELVES.

As I find myself time to time slipping back into the old cages, I try to keep short accounts with myself. Why am I displaying old behaviors? What is the hot button being pushed emotionally for me right now in this particular situation and is it valid? Where have I castrated my emotions and need to experience some healing and give myself grace to “be not alone”?

Every day we are given a chance, as that three year old, to step over the low lying fence of our inhibitions, draw near to the cage keeping us out and others in, and become the key that unlocks the door for all of us.  Then the world changes, and we begin to engage with those around us in a more meaningful way. We may get hurt, we may not. But we are not meant to live a life alone. It is a big ole beautiful world out there, waiting for us to join its creation. We may find the key, or be called to be a key for another, or perhaps both.