State of My World
For any of my readers that are not yet aware, I have made a major life change recently. As of March 2018, I took a job 5 hours north of my home in Oklahoma and uprooted the family. It was not an easy decision, but I felt that it was warranted. Simply put, we had grown so comfortable and complacent in our lives that things had grown stale. I was offered a job that would pay me a considerable amount more than what I made when I lived in Oklahoma with potential to earn a lot more. I took the two oldest children with me while my wife kept the other three and our exchange students so they could finish out the school year. This weekend was the first time that our family was officially reunified with no need to return (other than to visit friends) to Oklahoma. It was both a joy and a stress.
There is no doubt in my mind that God has placed me here to test my faith. If you followed the tone of my DITW posts, you would see how God has been building me and how I’ve been defecting as a human is wont to do to their king from time to time. I am still building new roots in this new place and learning to live life in a different way. We have found a good church that seems to be strong and supportive of our needs with solid spiritual underpinnings and a push to serve our fellow man. I’m not teaching ESL anywhere at the moment and although I plan on doing so eventually, now is not that time. I also completed teaching Spring B 2018 at Liberty and am taking a break there too.
So you ask… why? Why would you stop teaching since God has gifted you with this? Well, because my gifts are best suited for use when I am spiritually centered and that is not the place I am in right now. The first leg of this journey came to an end but the scars and the self realizations I had while on that journey have shown me that I still have a long way to go. I can see the light at the end of this tunnel, but it still seems that I have many miles to go before I get there. Furthermore, I found that when I was in the midst of teaching both professionally and as a mission, combined with the trials of every day work at my main job, caused me to be less connected and present with my family. I never intended it to be this way but that is what happened. Also, the cost of living versus income in my old job had flipped. I found that if I did not work both jobs, we simply could not support the lifestyle we had. Now, with the new income, I believe that we can finally live with my income once the financial costs of trying to maintain two residences subsides. So, why dedicate the time if I don’t need the money? That’s my approach.
What’s next? Ah! That is a question that I do not know how to answer. I will continue to maintain my blogs and post DITW and other things as I’m so inclined. I also will continue to devote many hours to unpacking and reassembling the life that we brought from Oklahoma. Suffice to say, 90% of my house is still in boxes and when I was teaching, being a single dad (figuratively speaking), working full time and trying to maintain life, I simply could not exert the energy to unpack it all. This weekend I was able to unpack many of my books and return them to the shelves in my new office and studio space in the basement. This is the first time I have actually unpacked my books since we moved from our smaller house in SW OKC to the bigger house in rural OKC. We simply didn’t have the dedicated office space to support it so I didn’t do it. Now, I have the space.
Even better, my wife will get to have an office space of her own (albeit, still shared with me) and a studio space for her to work on her art. This is ones of the selfish pleasures my otherwise 100% selfless wife enjoys. With being a SAHM, a small business owner, and the master coordinator in our house, she has had to put her desires to the side. Now, she sees the possibility of finally getting to have her own decompression space. I owe that to her. I just have to unpack it first.
So for now, as Stephen King’s book “The Gunslinger” states: “the world moves on”. I am trying to open myself to new and interesting ways that God can use me. Then, as Natasha Bedingfield’s popular song says “The rest is unwritten.” God bless!