The greatest of these…

(Updates below!)

I had planned for my next post to be about our vacation, but as I’m learning every day now, God changes our plans…sometimes drastically.

For all the years that I’ve known Dave, he’s wondered what he wants to do with his life. It’s not that he doesn’t know what he likes, but that he likes so many different things that there’s not much out there that will really help him feel more whole.

Last fall, he stumbled on an idea. I cried at first, because it scared me, and then I began to incorporate it into my daily existence and found it yummy on so many sides. It had just the right combination of fun and family and scary and money and challenge that we decided to try it out, to see if it could actually become real.

This summer, after our vacation, Dave exchanged some emails with the people who would have to agree to hire him for this to happen. They wanted all sorts of information–height, weight, date of discharge from the military–and we found it and gave it to them. Then we waited.

It only took a couple of days for us to get an answer, but it felt like forever. We talked, dreamed, schemed together. And then it came. He told me and I cried.

The truth is, this door isn’t shut, but they’ve determined that Dave is currently unqualified. It has nothing to do with his mind or his heart or his desire to minister. It has everything to do with some health concerns they have for him based on some current information and some history.

Are these things we can change? Maybe, with a lot of work and even more grace. But we’re a little bewildered, left wondering what God is trying to say to us and how hard we push this before we change our minds and hearts and plans and walk another direction. We had narrowed so much of our lives down to focus on this goal–I work so he can get a discount and go to school to get the degree that would make this job possible, he works so we have enough to live on while he’s going to school to get the degree that would make this job possible, we work out so that he can be in good shape to pass the prerequisite physical, we don’t know how much we should commit to a church because we might be gone in a couple of years–and it hurts to wonder if it was all for nothing.

No.

Nothing is for nothing with our God. None of this last year, none of last sememster which was harder than any one when I was in school, none of it. But we thought we knew what it was about and now we find that maybe we don’t and that’s hard.

I think that’s the summation of this post–it’s hard right now. Not “I’m going out of my mind because it hurts so bad” hard, but “Life doesn’t look quite as bright and tears are often near and I pray that God’s making something beautiful out of all of this because I can’t” hard. If vacation was a mountaintop, this is a valley. And so we walk, hand in hand, through our valley, praying that we have the faith to take each step, the hope to see resolution where we don’t expect it, and the love to draw nearer to each other as we answer these questions.

Update: Dave decided to go for it. That makes it sound more unilateral than it was, but the truth is that it was his decision to make since it’s his body. So pray for us as we investigate some options and try to figure out what will work best for us. There are a lot of changes we need to make if this is all going to work out, so pray for courage and stamina and whatever else God leads to to ask for. Thanks!!