I Have Been Young...

...very young, as I revealed in my first post, when I married my man. We were both pretty young, in fact. I was also very young in my walk with Christ and had much to learn. The first months of our marriage were lovely, filled with fun times with friends, enjoying our cute little apartment and the security of a new job for Mr. Brown at the University of Texas. I was completely in love with my life as a stay at home wife. Cooking, cleaning our tiny home, laundry and whatever else I could find to busy myself with filled all of an hour or two of each day. I had no car so being at home alone was, well, lonely. After about nine months of that we decided a job might not be such a bad idea after all. Because of the one car situation, it made sense for me start my job search at UT in the wild hope that I could find work there and we could ride to and from work together. Wonder of wonders, I got the very first job I applied for. It just happened to be located in an office on the second floor of the same building where my hubby worked! We loved going to work together, taking our lunches together and exploring the entire UT campus on those hour long lunchtimes. We drove home together each evening and enjoyed the same terrific holiday schedules. We didn't particularly mind the extra money, either. Funny how that works. We were in an awesome church that afforded us great teaching, community and opportunities for growth and service. We made friendships there that we still maintain to this day, even though we have moved about as far from one another as we could and still be in basically the same city. Before too long, we took the plunge and bought an adorable little house in a new suburb. Life was good.

One of the benefits of such a wonderful church was that we often enjoyed the teaching of visiting speakers in addition to that of our own wise pastor. On just such an occasion, I had the chance to attend the Sunday evening service but the hubs had to work a special event on campus. We had both been entertaining the idea that God had something special in store for us. I had begun to feel the need to be better at making a home. Being gone forty hours a week, teaching high school students in Sunday School, singing in the choir and being in a small group left little time to keep up with what had never stopped being a high priority to me, making a home. Grocery shopping, laundry and generally keeping up with all that is part of home ownership was getting harder to do. I kind of felt like I had abandoned my call. Dinners were often rushed affairs and some evenings we just couldn't even get the dishes done before dashing out the door to a meeting or church service. We began to pray about how we might rectify the situation we had made but by now, my salary covered much of our mortgage and utilities. We just couldn't do without my paycheck and a sinking, trapped feeling hovered overhead. Imagine my surprise when the message that fateful evening was about faith and obedience. The minister, I still remember his name, spoke about our need to answer with instant obedience when God calls something to our attention. Waiting until all the details lined up perfectly was not faith. He even went so far as to declare that someone in the room knew exactly what he was talking about. I know, it could have applied to anyone of us. I have been around a while and even though I may not have recognized it then, I know hype now. That was not what this was. I was pretty sure if I failed to act on what I knew God was saying to me, my heart would beat right out of my chest! I was so concerned that I could not adequately relate to Bill when he got home, what had been spoken that evening, that I requested a copy of the sermon to take home with me. Friends dropped me off and I waited not very patiently for my husband to return. I seem to remember pacing was involved. I prayed my heart out that he would hear me and that we would be unified in our decision. When he finally arrived, I asked him to sit down, that I had something he really needed to hear, and right now. He insisted instead that he needed to tell me something first. We argued back and forth for a minute or so and I reluctantly gave in and let him go first, if only to get it over with and move on to what I thought was the important part of the evening. He said, slowly and with what sounded like a bit of concern that I might freak out..."I know what you have to say...God is calling us to have you stay at home...now." I was completely dumbfounded! He was exactly right and we were in complete agreement! While it had taken a great deal of faith to endure the three years we had to wait to be married, we had never before been impressed to take such a leap of faith. We both knew that we could not make our budget without my salary. Bill felt for sure we would lose our new house. For reasons unknown to me, I was completely convinced we would not. We agreed that I would tender my resignation the next day and work only two more weeks. The adventure had just stepped up a notch. We had no idea what would await us but we had determined that "Sink or swim, we were going on with God."  To us that meant walking right up to the edge of the light, where the darkness starts, and taking another step. We wrote that resignation letter together, carefully wording  it to accurately reflect the reason and leave on the best of terms. We slept peacefully that night, content that there was no better place to be than squarely in the will of God. The outcome was His.

I have been young and now I am old,

Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken

Or his descendants begging bread.

Psalm 37:25

To be continued...

Fly Away, Little Birds...

See those little birds, up there to your right? They represent my little birds, the ones who have all flown away, or nearly so. One still technically calls this home but he is so rarely here that it has become little more than a pit stop. He drops in for food and clean clothes on a fairly regular basis, both of which still magically appear in his life. The others flew the coop, in what felt for all the world like the great migration. Oh, they began leaving several years ago. College, the Navy, foreign service, jobs, you get the picture. This was still home base, though. The place they came on school breaks, leave, holidays and really whenever they needed encouragement (or maybe it was just clean laundry and a good meal!) I still managed most things for them, whether it was keeping up with important papers, navigating college registration, dealing with tuition, medical bills, keeping gas in their cars and cell phones in their hands. I was the one they called about laundry disasters, whether or not they could eat something they had not, perhaps, stored properly and sometimes girl (or maybe even, boy) issues. OK, some of them still ask about those things, but not nearly as often. I made their doctor and dentist appointments, and generally served as their multi-purpose solution to most things in life. That's all changed. I really began to get it when within a twenty-one month period, five of our six "birdies" decided to marry. I'll recount the blessings of all those weddings in another post. I felt the emptiness, slowly at first when there was not as much laundry to be done, fewer places at the table and even less mess. I felt it as a new school year came and I was not preparing for it like I had for so many years prior. I really began to feel it as I released documents, long held securely, to now adult children or better yet, their new wives. Documents like birth certificates! Weren't those mine, given as some kind of award for birthing these six babies? No, they were theirs and they needed them now. Social Security cards, High School and College diplomas, transcripts...all the things I had kept so safely all these years were now in their hands. What if they lose them? Well, that will be their problem to deal with, won't it? I had to learn to suggest solutions to dilemmas when asked rather than offering them as I would before they were adults, and married at that. It took a few rewinds, if you will, before I began to get the hang of it. One of the best books I read on this season of life explained that in order to make this transition smoothly, mothers need to become smaller in the lives of their children. That was hard for me to take but I had to agree. For thirty years my main purpose has been mothering these kids, in a big way. By necessity as well as by choice, the rhythm of my life was determined largely by their needs. My schedule, my focus, my attention, my affection, my energy, our money...all were devoted to bringing these kids to right where they are now. No, it isn't over. That has been made clear. Kids aren't grown, we've learned, because they reach eighteen, high school graduation or even marriage. We had an adult child or two move back home because of  unemployment or a job that didn't just magically appear after college graduation. They will always be our children and most of them still seem  to want our involvement in their lives. Our relationship to them must change, however, and in my experience, change can be hard. There are way too many empty hours in my day now, lots more quiet than I am used to and I still buy entirely too much toilet paper! Old habits die hard. I, with the able assistance of my dear husband, am seeking God about what's next for this nearly empty nest. I need good work to do. I'm looking into that. Holidays have become harder to deal with as so many kids are going so many different directions. I am determined never to be that mother-in-law by guilting my kids into always being with us. We are learning to just go ahead with plans and not worry so much that someone might need us, or just want to eat at our place. I am beginning to understand that it is perfectly fine if we have a life, too, even if it is in a quieter, neater, and smaller nest.

The End from the Beginning

Some of my children have urged me to start blogging. I have resisted for several years and instead just enjoyed their stories and those of a few close friends. Events that have transpired recently have kind of shoved me off the fence of indecision and I'm going to at least take a stab at it now. There are times I just need to say something and, as life would have it,  my house is often completely empty. I guess one of the wonderful things about blogging is that if you don't like it or find it interesting, you just don't bother to read it and no one is any the wiser. Feel free!

Writing a blog about the second half of life kind of screams for a little insight into the first half. I think that this second half, which has come to fascinate me so much, has been shaped, if you will, by the choices and paths I have taken in the first. The biggest ones are what make me who I am...my relationship with God and subsequently the mate I chose to spend this life with. Both were very life altering decisions and neither was undertaken lightly. I came to saving faith in Christ as a teenager but did not have much opportunity for growth or discipleship. I was raised by a single mother and am the oldest of two children. Church was never a big part of my growing up. I studied the Bible quietly on my own and honestly got little benefit from that endeavor. At least that's what I thought at the time. Meeting the man who would be my husband was also critical to the formation of this story. That man, who was just a young Airman, stationed at what was Bergstrom AFB, was busy doing what he still does so well, caring for the needs of others. He had taken on the role of mentoring fatherless teen boys who lived near the base, one of whom just happened to be my brother. They met in the home of one of the other military families and it fell to me to retrieve my brother for dinner one evening. The phone was busy (remember that, before call waiting!?) so I just walked the few blocks instead. The door opened to reveal a veritable herd of boys strewn about the living room floor playing games, mothers serving up snacks and across the room stood Airman Brown. Our eyes met (are you hearing the sappy movie soundtrack yet?) and the rest, as they say, is history. Our courtship began, much to my little brother's dismay. Courtship? Did I say that? I don't think anyone used that term in the 70's, not the 1970's anyway! Well, even if we never used that word, that's what we had. A long-term...really long-term, dating relationship with the end goal being marriage. Did I mention I was fifteen!? I didn't think so. That factor meant that three years had to pass before the wedding bells could ring. That three years seemed like forever. But that time allowed for a great deal of discipleship, talking and sharing about just what kind of family we hoped to create. We had the privilege of learning all we could about Godly marriage. We took classes, read books and surrounded ourselves with other Christian couples so that we might be as prepared for a marriage that honored God as possible. While waiting three years to get married was not a lot of fun, we have never been sorry about any of the time and effort we put into preparing for our future. It has paid huge dividends, which we still benefit from today. So a month after turning eighteen and graduating from high school, we began this wonderful journey together. Our wedding, while all we hoped it would be, was a pretty sad little, low budget affair, the harbinger of things to come. Since we were each the oldest of our single parent families, leaving home at the end of high school was pretty much a given. While both good students, college was just not in the budget. The Air Force provided us with a good start but living on little would continue to be a challenge in life. In fact, nothing would be easy. We had several strikes against us already, given our parents' histories, birth order and relative poverty. We were nothing but hopeful, however, as we looked to our future. We'd started out by trusting God and that would come to be the gold standard throughout. The adventure continued, and I'll write about that now and again. Hopefully this brief back story will make it easier to relate to some of the things I write about in the future. I've learned a lot about God, my spouse, our children and myself. I've watched friends navigate these turbulent, empty nest/middle age waters. Some have done very well. Others, not so much. I am encouraged and committed to honoring God in this second half of life even more than when we undertook to begin our life together all those years ago. I'm not finished being a mother. The role just changes a bit as children fly from the nest. I'll write about some of those challenges, too. I am very much looking forward to developing anew that sweet courtship that started this story so long ago. Feel free to read along now and then.