Perspective

I decided many months ago that I wanted to write the Shafferland story. I think I was driven to make sure our story was committed to paper in case either one of us ended up forgetting who we were and how we lived. {Yes. Too much Notebook.}

I wrote the story of our first year a while ago and immediately launched into preserving the second year, but then life began to happen and I stopped writing. For some reason, this week, the writing bug bit {HARD} again, and I've been sneaking to the computer every spare minute to relive year two through blog posts, journal entries, and scrapbook pages so I can transcribe the story for posterity.

People, this is why I'm such an advocate for scrapbooking and journaling. So many things were hidden in those pages that I'd forgotten. I remembered much, but I'd forgotten much, too. Feelings and prayers, Scriptures and quotes, ups and downs, the funny and the heartbreaking - they were all waiting for me in words and pictures.

The particular part of our story I'm writing right now is exhausting me as I relive it. In no particular order, here were some of our obstacles in our second season:

* Double commuting
* Polar vortex
* Job stresses
* Double home ownership
* Low self-esteem {okay that one was just me}
* Plumbing replacement

Daunting enough in list form. But each point carried sub-points that added about 150 pounds of emotional weight to each of us.

Job stresses weren't just "job stresses." They were weights that made Ryan hold his breath to see if his very job would hold and weights that sent me home sobbing every. single. day.

Double home ownership wasn't just about the inconvenience of owning two homes. It was about drowning beneath betrayal from people who had committed to buying Ryan's old house and then moved out instead, leaving us not only stuck with a house, but spending spare dollars we didn't have to repair damages they left.

It was all-consuming. So many questions. So many decisions. So much unknown. So much hurt.

As I sorted through the pages of my journal, I stopped cold on these words, written on February 23, 2014:

Bring the right people for the {Greentown} house and bring the right house for us. Give us direction about where we should go. Bring us HOME.

Of course in my mind, all this bringing and giving would happen in short, orderly fashion. Isn't that ultimately the hope of all our prayer requests when we utter them?

In reality, it would be five more months before we received an offer on Ryan's house, and it would be another 141 days {five months, roughly} before we signed the house over to its new owner. But in that long, daunting, ten-month span, God would indeed answer the cry of my heart: the right people bought the house. We still smile when we drive by and see how they continue to make it their own. We are grateful it can bless them, and we are simultaneously grateful to be out from under the deep stress of owning two homes.

And in fact, exactly two years after I wrote this prayer in my journal {two years TO THE DAY}, we received word that the appraisal on our new house, our now house, was complete. And in less than one month from that day, we would own the house and be mid-renovation already.

In those two years, God did bring the right house. He did give us direction. He was lining up the buyer for the house we had shared the first few years of our marriage. He'd freed me to be a stay-at-home wife.

It wasn't short or orderly, but it was complete.

This is why I love to journal. I have, as Ann-Voskamp wrote in The Broken Way, "God-Amnesia." I forget what I know to be true. I lose sight of the journey we've walked together. I need to be reminded of His faithfulness - not just in the ANSWERS, but in the journey that LEADS to the answers. The journey matters as much, if not more, than the answers.

I sit here today, grateful for that hard year we lived. I'm not sure how we survived it with smiles on our faces, as I look back over the consistent crushing blows of that year. But we did survive it, and we are stronger and more unified as a couple and in our faith today than we were before the year began.

I'm also profoundly grateful for the answers. They came slowly, but God was faithful in the journey.