Changes, Changes

Do you ever hear those stories about how someone’s life changed in a moment?  Well, I never really thought that would be me.  I’m a planner.  I like things organized.  And I’m a control freak. So when I went to bed two Sunday nights ago, I did not expect that the next Sunday I would be saying goodbye to my church family, where I have been for 28 years, and moving to Barrie to start my life all over again.

Obviously, there was a major life change in there.  But one I’m not going to tell you about.  At least not for quite a while.  I was asking my writing group to help me figure out how much to share on my blog.  They were full of wisdom.  We decided that a couple weeks of complete silence would be best.  Followed by a short update with not much detail.

Here’s the thing.  With advice, I’ve decided to be authentic, but not transparent at this time.  In other words, I’m still going to share with you all the things I’ve learned, what God is teaching me at this time, how I feel about things, but I’m leaving out all the personal details for now.  Its been a hard change for my family and we need time to figure things out first.  As one of my fellow writers said, you have to live the lessons first before you can share them.

So here are the details I can give you.  Because you must be curious by now:)  Michael left the ministry officially about two weeks ago.  We moved to Barrie and are attending Heritage Baptist Church.  Michael is looking for a job up here while I’m adjusting to the life of a mom whose kids now go to Christian school instead of homeschooling.  I use the term adjusting lightly.  I’m kind of in love with it.  You may remember a recent post about not wanting to homeschool this year, so that worked out well!  The kids are adjusting very well.  Because of the camp ministry, I think we could go anywhere and they would have friends there, but they have some especially good ones here.  Emma is the only one struggling since the math change has been hard for her.  Apparently going from Saxon math to Abeka math in grade four is extremely challenging.  But they’ve only been in school two days, so I’m sure in a few weeks she will be perfectly fine.

We love this church and the Pastor and his wife.  We’re looking forward to serving there and are excited about our upcoming time there.

I want to be sure that with all this excitement about not homeschooling and the church here that I don’t give the impression that I was happy about having to leave Harvesters.  And the way that we did.  It was heart wrenching and hard and as Emma described it after our last Sunday, “well, that was the hardest day of my life!”.  Its not easy to leave the place you went to many times a week for 28 years.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get that level of familiarity back.  And I loved my Pastor and his wife dearly.  They were like second parents to me.  That church has many good people and many good memories.

But, now its time to look forward.  I started choir practice, I have some muffins and pot pies to make, and I’m trying to start putting faces with names.  Change can be hard, but its not all bad either.