I have just spent the past two months settling into my new life in California, doing all the things that accompany a big move: opening checking account, getting car registered, finding a church family,  finding a new job, etc., and not necessarily in that order. All in all a terrific way to get my bearings where I now live as well as giving me time to think about where I am at this stage of my life.

I had the very good fortune of attending a women’s retreat with my church this past weekend. There could be no better way of feeling connected in a new place than there was for me in meeting women with whom I already had so much in common. This is a church of truly faith-based believers, and I was overwhelmed by the depth of their sharing and their vulnerabilities. I was even more impressed with the depth and breadth of the heart of our God who met us there!

As I enter a new stage of my almost thirty year journey with Him, I realize the labels I have been wearing have changed. I no longer feel the need to identify myself as a “single parent,”  for instance. That has left the field wide open for God to give me a new assignment and perhaps a new calling. I have passionately defended and supported single parents for over thirty years, and always have and always will empathize with the difficulties they face. My walk with the Lord, however, has shown me that those circumstances are truly no more or less difficult than those  all women face, many with additional challenges involving a husband that can often make things considerably more difficult.

I have processed many things in this walk so far, just trying to stay afloat. Now I see that while there are certainly Selah’s (pauses where we can reflect and take stock of what has been said) in our journeys, there isn’t an end where we get to stay safe and secure and retire. If that happens we can consider ourselves stuck. God always has more in store for us, and my faith tells me that I had better make sure I get growing or He will certainly allow me some uncomfortable circumstances to help convince me to press forward.

So I instead choose to step forward, continually putting myself out where things happen and where God can continue to teach, love and support my growth. While this rest felt very nice for a short time, I recognize the best with God often comes in the hardest trials. So I need to keep risking and keep moving toward the prize, even when I can’t see it and may not even know what it is. It is, like any relationship, a sense of even more intimacy and love than I could ever have imagined, and that continues to expand beyond what I think is possible. Being blown away by His continued healing, loving presence in my life has always been the most incredible gift at the other side of a difficult time.  How exciting to look back at my journey, knowing He will continue to reveal His plan to me and light the way there, as well as continue to walk alongside me! How awesome is that!

Yesterday was a miracle day. It was the fifth anniversary of my oldest son’s marriage to the love of his life. That’s when the new love in our family began to spill over into my life in a big way. It was when I realized a part of me was a California girl at heart. Every trip to see my son and his wife in California let more friends into my circle there and widened my extended family.

A month ago I completed my move to the southern California city of San Clemente. It felt as though it was home immediately, and every day I have added new friends to my circle here. People were easy to meet and talk to. They seemed to go out of their way to make me feel comfortable. My dog was as content and happy as I was, and our daily walks to the Pacific Ocean were a source of confirmation, that I had made the right move.

But yesterday the reasons multiplied. My first grandchild was born to my son and his wife. I was there in the waiting room with her family for over eight hours. I think there are paths in the heart that cannot be erased after they have been traveled, nor can you ever turn around and go back to how you were before. Having a child is one of them. Watching your child have a child is another.

The experience was breathtaking, in the way that seeing the Grand Canyon only a month before with my youngest son was breathtaking. The difference was they get to take this little one home with them and continue the breathtaking forever. And I get to be part of her life until the day I die. I told my son it is like seeing your heart walking around outside your body and yesterday he said he now understands how that feels. Like the splitting of cells, your heart is split open and then multiplies, and more and more hearts burst open with love, and the wave of wonder and awe at this tiny miracle who comes into our lives and truly changes the landscape forever is bigger than one can imagine, until it happens to you.

I was talking to two good friends this morning and noticed I had repeated the same phrase twice, so I figure there is more than one person who needs to hear it besides me!

I was talking about going through my years of stuff, something I also find I am not alone in doing these days, and so many things no longer need to be saved. They are pictures, letters, papers relating to a me that I have outgrown. Oh, a lot of clothing goes in that category as well! Seriously, there are things that you have grown beyond, people who are no longer in your life, things that were important that have taken their seat in the balcony, or the basement.

We grow, hopefully, into the best version of ourselves over time. This requires updating, as would a previous edition of most books. A little editing, refining, making current the most important parts of our story. I referred to this refining as getting the barnacles off, as one would remove them from the bottom of a boat, so that it could skim through the water faster. That is what I am doing, scraping off barnacles for my own ease of movement to the next phase of my journey. What can I let go of that will allow me to travel easier, faster, a slimmer, more compact version of myself?

There are some parts I will leave behind. Past ways of earning a living, such as real estate and faux finishing, are probably best served traveling only as memories. They both carry a lot of weight in supplies and paperwork, past clients and information galore. I actually enjoyed the relief that followed my shredding of past files and was aware of a heaviness that lifted immediately off me. I am still wrestling with furniture, what to sell and what to give away, but that will sort itself out soon.

What I want is to take the very best, most streamlined version of my best self, pared down only to the necessities to maintain that self, and then begin my new life armed with the knowledge of who that person is, today, and what is important to her. On that I can build my best new life!

As I ready myself for Life Change # ?, I am once again revisiting my past, as I sort through what seems like more photos than I ever remember taking or being caught in and many more notebooks, yearbooks, documents and letters than I can keep (or need to!)

I have written less in my blog, but  I do seem to be processing more in my head. More thoughts, more inward thinking, more moments of just trying to make sense of where I have been so I can more easily chart where I am going. I had started trying to connect my own dots, see what were the common denominators of the former parts of my life. One of the joys of doing this is that it resembles writing one’s own memoir or eulogy, someone else isn’t doing it for me.

That is even one of my common threads, trying to put a name on my journey through life. I am getting closer. In the course of excavating hundreds of well-worn self-help books, I came across one that slipped by unopened. It turned out to be providential that I had overlooked it because it is the perfect guide for this part of my travels!

I have been trying to pull together ideas for a new job when I arrive at my new base in California. In reviewing past forms of both vocations and avocations, I began to notice similarities of intent, if not of description. This book is called Is Your Genius At Work? by Dick Richards, and it has really helped me. I don’t know whether it will lead to a new job or not, but it is helping me find the truth in my resume. It leads you through exercises to name what you do that no one else does in the same way, putting a two word name to your particular gift and seeing how your life and work line up with it. Its really more like extracting it from your life, because it was always there, and you have always been doing it (or trying to).  It would consist of a gerund (a verbal noun ending in ‘ing’) and another noun which together form an active representation of what ‘you bring to the party’ and would do easily and for nothing. Because that is true, it would also be your happiest form of employment or volunteer work.

I think what I would most like to do would require a counseling degree and Masters to do it for pay, but I am drawn to it nonetheless. We will see where God goes from here. Sorry to be so absent from blogging lately. I have been sorting through my life and it seems one can only handle so much downsizing at any one time and, interestingly, there have been fewer things to write about than when I am interacting with others ….which is also, it appears, a major indicator of my life’s work and perhaps my ‘genius’ as it turns out!

I am sitting here trying to figure out how to comfort my dog, Gypsy, through what seems like an endless storm this morning. I am grateful that I do not have to be anywhere else, but I really can do little to alter the fear that he is dealing with. My presence probably helps, as he does seem to want to find a place in whatever room I move to, but he faces away from me, almost as if he is trying to keep an eye out so he sees the approaching danger before it gets me. It is only because this is the opposite of normal for him that I even notice.

Heavy panting seems to be the way to calm oneself at the worst moments(if you are Gypsy), as when huge thunderclaps come. Right now it is actually almost quiet and he is slithering under the bed, a very tight squeeze. His body is all under but his legs are sticking right out. As I grabbed my camera he was able to pull them under as well, so I missed a cute shot. I guess he is recuperating from the last few hours and hoping it will be the end of it. Might stay in bed and pull the covers over your head be the human equivalent of his denial, or is he hiding so the storm can’t find him when it returns?

I was thinking of the panting exercises you learn in childbirth classes, to get you ready for contractions that you may not know will be so bad. I guess panting and breathing are the critical ways to live through unidentified fears. I know Gypsy takes a very different stance when facing a known fear, like an animal that doesn’t seem to particularly like him. Storms are a seemingly unknown fear, as I guess  the world could come to an end in any one of them, from a canine perspective. No amount of my telling him he has lived through this before seems to be of any help.

When someone tells you ” just breathe” it seems so simple and yet we often forget we are holding our breath. That’s good if you are going under water, but if drowning is not the fear, opt for breathing. When you hear a dog in a thunderstorm, his breathing is almost as loud as the beating of his heart. I guess that’s a good sign, when you feel your heart beating as though it would leave your chest….start breathing! Oh, and be sure to remember God’s presence is always in the room with you.

Not to take anything away from Forest Gump, but lately I am more inclined to compare life to dentistry! That could have a great deal to do with my age and/or the condition of my teeth and gums, or it might just be a good analogy to which only a lucky few dental victims can relate!

It is interesting as I continue this journey, looking back at the pictures and memories of my past as I make way for my future, that I come face to face with many emotions I have thus far refused to acknowledge. I guess I have made it this far by having a Pollyanna attitude about most things, choosing to put a smiley face on those things that caused the most pain, but about which I really had little choice but to accept them.

As I make ready my heart for the joy of grandparenting and everything leading up to it, God has taken me by the hand to revisit the months leading up to the birth of my first son. As it also held clues of a marriage that was not going to make it past the baby’s first birthday, there was a lot of pain mixed in with my best thoughts. That’s where the root canal comes in.

God is so tender and loving and always waits until we give Him permission to take us back and clean up our memories. Going to the dentist for surgery is similar. First you have to recognize there is pain. Then you have to decide how you are going to deal with it. You may try to ignore it for awhile, taking some kind of pain killers and hoping it just goes away. You may get so angry you just have it pulled, leaving forever an empty place where a tooth was, but at least the pain is gone as well. Most of all you have to count the cost. A root canal can be expensive. Saving a tooth with a cap can be expensive. You have to be willing and able to make the payment.

That is where I find myself with God. Once I realize there is a painful memory and I decide it is worth it to fix, we find a time and a safe place to go back into that situation and remember what really happened. God’s mercy and grace are the Novocaine and fillers for the job of excavating the debris that is causing the pain. An old decayed root that is preventing me from feeling complete joy. Once we go back and finish the job, there is instead a healed place from which I can experience total happiness! Instead of losing the use of that piece of my heart, I have repaired it and changed the memories forever. Now if something touches that memory, there will no longer be a sharp pain that pierces the moment for me, but instead a strong new surface, ready to experience everything that current moment holds.

There are friends who caution me sometimes “We can’t go back there, it’s too painful” but I say make the appointment and get it done! When something happens that triggers a painful memory, ask God to go back with you and clean out the dying root. You will never know how wonderful it feels to have your  heart healed if you aren’t willing to schedule the appointment with Him.

Sometimes it occurs to me that I process ideas and new behaviors in a hit and run method. Right now I am really trying to add some new habits to my daily routine. I am trying to begin a certain regime of vitamins, to see if my energy and arthritis symptoms improve significantly.

I have also started to breathe more deeply, having noticed that I probably use only half my available lung capacity with my shallow breathing, and that being the case, I am probably robbing my cells of the oxygen they need to stay really healthy. It is not easy to change the way you breathe. It is something on which I have to concentrate, and I can feel the place halfway there where I am tempted to stop and the block I have to press through every time to do it differently than what comes naturally. Let’s face it, I have been breathing poorly for most of my life!

What I mean by hit and run is that I have definitely had these urges to change behaviors in the past. I think of them, ponder them for a day or to, perhaps start a plan to incorporate them, but then I move to something else that distracts me from my purpose and I basically give up trying to notice if there was any difference or a way to measure it. I call that a lack of discipline on my part, but in order to change it I am finding it necessary to come at the problem from another direction.

Having 90 days to bring about a move across the country and finish up my business on this coast has given me an opportunity to put some new behaviors into place as I try to structure my departure. I am finding  mental clarity is really necessary to keep me on track, defining priorities for each day, week and month. Finding a way to discipline myself is a continual challenge, and while I have not found a total solution, I am trying to adapt what I already know about myself and work with that. I will keep you posted as I try not to run but rather to stick around until I find a way to get better performance out of my mind and body!

And what does this have to do with my day? I was watching an interview this morning with a man who studies them in the wild, and who is doing a documentary about them over the past seven years . At the moment there is only speculation as to why Knute died in the Berlin Zoo yesterday, at the young age of just four.

This man said that while he was not a vet and did not know for sure, that perhaps the animal had a seizure of some sort, but the habits and challenges of a polar bear in the wild can not be replicated in a zoo. Polar bears are by far one of the most intelligent predators he has ever studied. Mainly because they have to live in a constantly changing landscape of ice flows, they train themselves to catch their prey in three dimensions. They stalk under water, above water, and by jumping from one chunk of ice to another. They are extremely good at challenging the elements in their way, and of figuring out ways to get to their food. It is never simple, nor is it ever the same.

This made me think of what I was trying to say in yesterday’s blog.  I never think of myself as extremely intelligent, though I recognize that I have a way of thinking about problems that some of my more degreed family members never seem to grasp. It has continually amazed me at how one dimensionally a person trained in absorbing only what has been written seems to think and process what is happening in the present.

I, on the other hand, seem to process what happens as it is happening, without all prior knowledge to get in my way. I notice how people actually behave and operate in situations and how their emotions affect their circumstances, as well as how their circumstances affect their emotions, and then how that leads them to be able to change those circumstances or not. For someone who thinks life is already figured out and there is a right and wrong way to go about it, this is way off the mark and easily discounted.

For years I let that view of (my)life make me feel inferior. The longer I live, however, the more I notice that these skills of observation actually give me a feeling of confidence and lack of worry that the thinkers don’t have. My faith overrides their worry. It can’t be explained by mere principles, it just is. There will be no degree conferred from this knowledge, but it seems worthy of one, none the less.

The polar bear may have died from lack of both stimulation and lack of challenges for his intelligence. He needed to keep figuring things out with his mind, and in his caged environment the days were pretty much the same, one after another. This affected his mental state, which could very much have affected his physical state. When I said yesterday that I seemed to need challenges to prevent a slow death, I was grasping for that same piece of information. Some people, and some animals, will never be content with the status quo. They will continually see things that could be improved and try to make a difference. They need the juxtaposition of ideas and circumstances to give them an ever different perspective.

They need a continually changing landscape to their life. That certainly makes the twenty-some moves of my adult life make a bit more sense now, doesn’t it? Or perhaps they need people around them who constantly challenge their way of thinking and doing things, not ones who choose the comfort of doing them a certain way once and for all. That is why I feel like a rebel in some situations, though I know I am a peace maker at heart. The status quo,  in and of itself, will always challenge me to improve upon it, and I may always butt heads with those who are comfortable with it just the way it is.

I had been speaking with a friend on the phone and she was remarking about my story and how I continually made lemonade out of lemons, so to speak.

In response I told her it was actually not the challenges, but the lack of challenges that sometimes made me ready to give up in life. I seemed to do better with the crises than I did without them. They drew something out of me, an energy, a hope and faith that propelled me to figure out a solution.

My life may at times have looked like a disaster to others, but the challenges that have presented themselves have definitely given me the courage to take on new ones. I look back and see how God has used them all for my good, even when that seemed incredible and impossible. There are a couple challenges right now that I will be interested in looking back at to see how that happens yet again. As it is now, the losses of the past two years have put me in the enviable position of having as little baggage as at any point in my life to make a significant move, so it’s all good.

Only when we look back can we ever see God’s hand in our lives in the things that confuse us. Many of my entries over the past two years have been filled with uncertainty about where I was going and why so much seemed to be changing for me. All the things that previously seemed like losses become freedom in the circumstances I am in beginning to create today.

As I look at making a major move across the country, I am thrilled that I don’t have a home to sell, thanks to last year’s bankruptcy. I do not have a thriving real estate business to leave, courtesy of our present economy. I have become used to living without my furniture, thanks to a friend with whom I moved in temporarily. All the things that seemed so difficult to understand now have an entirely new framework within which to observe them and make new decisions. How light and free I am, now that everything is down to the basics!

What I learned in all of the paring down of the past few years is that I am a relational person. My relationship with God is foremost, then my relationships with family and friends and all the other wonderful connections that have crossed my path. Knowing this has made it really easy to make a choice to move. Not having a husband, particularly one with a job, meant I did not have to get permission or agreement, or impose my needs on anyone else. The things that made me feel lonely and single became the gifts that allowed me to follow my heart. How could I have known this when I was in the midst of despair or depression? Only by faith.

Hopefully when I read backwards in this blog, or better yet start from the beginning and read forward, I will see evidence of that faith as I went from one crisis to another, putting the pieces together as best I could, knowing God’s grace was always with me. I know I was often in a downward spiral, but I also know that He helped me to keep my head above water when I kept my eyes fixed on Him and His promises to me. I have never been disappointed with the journey we have been on together, and now it is time to move on to the next place and see what He has for me to do there. Having been taken to Berlin in 1987, seemingly to learn to pray deeply with a huge group of women brought there for the same reason, I am excited. We prayed for the wall to come down, believing in what seemed at the time impossible. Two years later, it did. With the idea of earthquakes and fault lines and radiation fears all over our West Coast, I can imagine that He needs more people of faith out there praying. If so, that is OK with me. There are many kinds of missionaries in this world. Perhaps someone’s fears will open an affordable home opportunity for me!

I am one who never seems to be under the covering of any particular church or ministry, yet I know I am under the cover of the Holy Spirit continually, and so I will go where  I am called and see what is needed there. It is always exciting when God changes our course and direction. His plan is always better than the one I might have made without Him. I hope to keep posting as I take one step at a time following the map as it is laid before me. I have to admit, a part of me thinks I should start a blog called “How to downsize your life to what fits in a car and move across the country in 90 days!” I had better google that, as undoubtedly someone has already written one that I can follow!

The biggest part, as in all things, is keeping my faith way ahead of my fear, knowing the enemy will try to keep me from going where God is leading. Having a prior track record of similar journeys is a big help when it comes to that. We have done this together before, and God is in my driver’s seat!