I dreamed in the night God was moving us to Massachusetts. Why there of all places?
I went through our home, full of all its comforts and marked what we would need with green dots, and blue dots on memory pieces to pack permanently away in a box. Deciding which few pieces to keep felt brutal. The rest was to be liquidated in an estate sale, most of everything we have collected over the years.
I woke up with the thought of my little Mexican figurine brought to me by my now 26 year old daughter when she was twelve from her first missions trip, resting unceremoniously on a resale shelf at Goodwill, as though this trinket held no precious value beyond the ceramic.
I didn’t like my dream.
I am doing life in this season with a woman twenty years my elder, and indeed she is walking through transitions. The loss of her husband. A race run well. The sale of her family home. Foresight. Downsizing, and purging. Unfettered.
She is modeling life well for me. Her passion for God and conversational intimacy with Him gives her the courage to face life, and to face the loss of it, and the loss of what has brought comfort in different seasons. If God doesn’t call us to painful transitions, eventually our family will as simplification becomes imperative.
Painful does not equate to bad.
My daughter on the spectrum turns twenty-four this month. Transitioning into independence has been difficult for her, hindered by mental health challenges and discrimination in the workforce. It never occurred to me I would be losing both her and her younger brother, a whole seven years younger, flying from the nest in the same year. Yet I suspect this is exactly what will happen.
Success.
Painful success.
Painful because transitions are hard, and can feel like loss even when the result is actually gain, a WIN.
Definitely a win.