Grieving, Groundwork, and Goosebumps

When I turned in my resignation to WBCL, I gave almost twelve weeks' notice. The job has many tiny pieces and parts to it, and training takes a while. I wanted to be fair to Lynne and to the person God has for this job...to have plenty of time to train before moving ahead into what God has next for me. It seemed great at the time. Twelve weeks. All kinds of time. Goodbyes were far away.

But I'm learning that a twelve week goodbye is all kinds of hard. Every day, I walk into that office and take visual stock of my space...I sit and have conversations with my work buds...I make plans for future shows...and then it hits me. I won't be there when those shows air. And in eight weeks, I won't be having conversations with those work buds, unless they call or FaceTime me.

Pretty sure that for the next eight weeks, I should just take my makeup to work every day, because I think I am bound to cry on all days that end in Y.

It's a grieving process, this leaving. It's saying goodbye to something I have known, loved, and held dear for four years. And I don't apologize for grieving. I don't apologize for being sad to let go of a beautiful gift I've loved so greatly.

I've got a checklist of tasks to complete before I leave, and one of them was to make copies of the blog posts I wrote for Mid-Morning over the last four years. I didn't want to forget the words I'd written, so I spent some time copying them over into a document to preserve. I glanced at my posts as I copied them, and more than once, I noticed I'd written about waiting. About what God had been doing in me in seasons of waiting.

He laid the groundwork in those times. Five years before I got the job at WBCL, one of my co-workers walked in my office at IWU and handed me a slip of paper with words on it. He told me it was the login and password for a blog he'd created. For me. Blog, he told me. Your words need to be read. I had no idea that day...that I'd need to know this skill for a job five years down the road. Same with my book. I wrote the words of the Advent devotion for me...for a season of studying I did on my own. Awkwardly, I shared it with friends. Publish it, they said. Your words need to be read. So, scared out of my mind, I did just that. And I had no idea it would be the thing that opened the door for that job.

Groundwork. He was laying it the whole time, and I never saw it. But as I glanced over my blog posts, I recognized the groundwork theme in the waiting posts. And I know...even in this time of tears and grieving a hard goodbye, He's laying more groundwork, for a future I can't see.

And that gives me goosebumps. When the tears start to fall at work, and I feel overwhelmed by the goodbye of it all, I push myself to think about the future. The future that while yet unknown, is so exciting. A future full of possibilities and joy. A future to find out the next part of why God has called me to be here, now, for such a time as this. How can that be anything OTHER than exciting?

So that's this week in my heart...a little grieving, a little {invisible} groundwork, and a lot of goosebumps for a future He's writing.

{Photo taken during my first week of work, when Lynne and I had a photo shoot and found the groundwork of a beautiful friendship being laid.}