Most of the time, I am very present in my life. I am there for my husband and my kids and my friends. I appreciate the things I have and the things I can do. I feel incredibly blessed to be who I am and where I am in the time I have here on earth. Most of the time, I pay attention.
But. And it's a big "but". There are times when I can go days or even weeks without really noticing the things that are going on around me. I am making lunches and walking through my neighborhood and having dinner with friends and helping my kids with their homework without ever really paying attention to lunches and my neighborhood and dinner with friends and my kids with their homework.
This past Friday, we packed the kids up as soon as they all got home from school and drove just an hour north to camp in a state park on a small lake. We don't usually camp once the kids are back in school, but we had a free weekend and decided to go for it.
That's how I got to wake up at 7:30 Saturday morning, step outside the door of the camper, and see this:
The lake, with steam rising off the top, the sun orange in the sky and, though I didn't snap the photo in time, two colorful hot air balloons floating off into the blue distance. And I noticed. I noticed the way the sun was warm on my face but the breeze was cold on my arms. I noticed the way the seagulls were soaring over the lake and their reflection was on the water. I saw the clouds and the ducks and the leaves on the trees. I noticed.
And the further into the weekend we got, the more I noticed, and the more I thought. My sweet A. catching his biggest fish ever, a large-mouth bass.
The sight of my three adventurous kids hiking in front of me on the trail.
A beautiful flower that I don't know the name of, but that was the only flower growing in a patch of green, some of which was Poison Ivy.
A still, quiet lake and the sounds around it: tree frogs and bird calls and my children laughing with each other.
My oldest son, E., walking out onto this fallen log, pushing the envelope as usual and loving every second of it. This could be our last camping trip with E., as next summer he'll be working and getting ready for college and who knows what else and might not have time to go camping with his family.
And conversations around the campfire, with the fire hot on my face but my arms and legs trembling from the cold. Talking about our favorite meals ever and funny jokes we've heard and how the Halloween Ghost Peeps we roasted over the fire tasted a little like Frosted Flakes. And the laughter. Always, the laughter.
I am not the kind of mom whose life is made up of only my children, all the time. I love them, and I enjoy them, but we are meant to raise them to be independent and to be able to, when the time is right, go off on their own. I think that D. and I will do fine someday when our children are grown and living their lives. I will not miss making school lunches or helping with homework or breaking up fights every single morning over breakfast.
But this. The laughing and the hiking and the conversations across a campfire. These are the things I will miss. That's why on weekends like these, I take special care not to sleepwalk through the days. Instead, I notice.
I have actually been wanting to post for a while, but there has only been one thing on my mind, and until now I haven't been able to write about it. Now, however, the word is out and everyone involved has been told, and I can officially write about the fact that I just left my job. Well, am leaving my job, I guess. I have six more days there, only four of them actual workdays.
I'm not leaving because of anything horrible that happened, or any hard feelings or difficulties. I love my job, actually. And while I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is the right decision, I still have mixed feelings about the actual leaving. I will miss being part of the amazing team with which I work. I will miss our Tuesday staff lunches and our birthday breakfasts out. I will miss the busy-ness that comes up before a big project or transition, all of us working together to be on the same page and meet a deadline and laughing together along the way. I will miss focusing on a big task so hard that I lose all track of time. I will also miss my paycheck, but I'm not going to worry about that quite yet. But my job...yes, I will definitely miss it.
But there's another part of me...the biggest part of me, right now, I guess...that is feeling tremendous relief. I am excited to be a stay-at-home mom and wife right now. I'm excited to get to the gym three days a week and to cook healthy meals. I'm excited to organize some closets and have lunch with my best friend. I'm thrilled to be able to volunteer in my son's classroom and keep up with what the school board is doing. And most of all, I'm excited to go to church on Sundays with my husband and just sit among the congregation, worshipping with my church family and hearing the message.
You see, my job is church. Not really....my job is running a ministry at my church, part of the children's ministry, actually. And while I loved meeting new families and making the children feel welcome and training new classroom volunteers and being "on" all Sunday morning, every Sunday, I have grown so weary. It wasn't my weekday job...I loved that part of it, and I still do. I love editing the curriculum and working on the budget and poring over spreadsheets and all of those weekday tasks that had me toiling away behind the scenes. And Sunday church was just another part of my job, one that was hard some days and fun some days, and always interesting and exhausting. But for the past couple of months, as I have watched my friends and family go into the worship center, and come out talking about the service, I have been a bit resentful. Church, lately, has felt like work. And work, in turn, has felt like God. And that's not okay. I am more than ready for church to feel like church again. I need for God to just be God, in all his glory. He always was, of course. It was me that changed. It was me that stopped seeing it.
I feel so in-between right now. I have a few more days at my job but I'm not doing any of my normal stuff. I'm just preparing things to be able to easily pass on my tasks to whoever comes next in this position. So I'm sort of gone, but not really. Not yet. And what I wonder is, what comes next? Where will I be in a few months? In a year? Five years from now? I really have no idea. And for the first time in my whole life, I'm not working hard at trying to figure it out. I'm waiting to be shown. I'm waiting to see what God has in store for me. I'm just doing the "next right thing."
So that's what's going on with me. That's why I haven't written. The decision, and the resignation, and the process of moving on has been all that's on my mind lately. I'm so glad to finally get to share it all. And I guess we'll find out together what's next on my journey. Thank you so much for reading.
