Moving on

Greetings. I write to you from a better place than where I was only a few days ago. For many of my close friends and family, you know the difficulties we have had in the past few years. I will not go into too much detail, although I will give you enough detail to know where we were and were we hope to be next.

You know the saying, "When God closes a door he opens a window"? Well over the past year we have been telling ourselves that. We have been waiting for that window to open. Or at least for faulty weather stripping to let a draft in. Sometimes when a door closes in life, it is like a little death. I am convinced that we spend a good deal of our lives mourning these deaths, trying to recover from the indelible hole that has been left in our hearts. Sometimes it is the loss of a friendship that has run its course. Perhaps it is the loss of a dream that we had built up which never came to fruition. And sometimes it is a literal death. Whatever the situation, we spend our lives trying to fill that gap, going through the stages of grief when eventually we get to the place where the pain becomes dull but not forgotten.

A few years ago, Eric and I had a miscarriage, which I thought I would never emotionally recover from. I don't know that you ever recover from something like that. It was the worst pain that we have ever been through. But through that loss we saw that, as a couple, we were going to have to sink or swim. We couldn't let our grief consume us or eventually we would have nothing left. After the experience of that pain, we have learned to focus on the positives in life. To seek out God's plan. Above all we have learned to rely on each other. We have learned that new life is on the other side of the heartbreaks we experience.

This past week Eric and I received the news that we had so badly hoped for during the past year. Eric was offered a job. Several hours later after crunching the numbers, we accepted the position. The next morning, we received an email....rescinding the offer. It turns out that the individual who offered Eric the job felt that him waiting several hours before accepting it, was unacceptable. Several hours. But as far as I am concerned (and as far as sympathetic family and friends are concerned) taking several hours to accept a job where you have to move away from everything you have come to know (even if it is to move back to your hometown) and where the health care coverage is nearly four times what you are currently paying, isn't entirely unreasonable.

When Eric called to tell me at work, I was shocked. Shocked turned to being upset, which ultimately led to anger. How dare this lady and this company interview Eric for 6 weeks, put him through a series of background and credit checks, tests, multiple interviews, etc., and then have the audacity to rescind an offer in email the day after he has already accepted it? As you can see, I am still working on the anger part.

We already had a vacation planned so we took this time to refocus. We took the time to remember all the gifts that God has given us. We have counted our blessings and are now going to take this time to look forward to the future. That is not to say that we are not at times filled with a huge sense of doubt. But I recently read that "doubt is a first cousin to faith." I pray for grace. But most of all I pray for faith to accept what God's plan is for us.

To all my family and friends: I love you. But after today, Eric and I are moving on from this particular incident. We don't want to discuss the logistics of why it didn't work out, or what we might have done differently. We don't want to dwell on what cannot be for us right now. Instead we will look to the future and eventually, that damn window will open.