Real Talk: Faith, Change And Accepting The Unknown - My Three Year Journey That Has Changed Me
This blog post has been sitting on my heart for quite a while now but I’ve struggled to find a quiet moment to put my thoughts on paper. So, now, this slow Sunday morning, while I let my kids be entertained by the television and with a hot cup of tea in hand, I’m doing it.
Things I’ve Never Said
I’ve spent the past few years in quite a life transition and mostly for my own recollection and processing, I’ve wanted to write it all down. So, this post really serves more as a journal entry for my own self rather than anything else really. But, my hope in sharing it with you, is that you may find some tid bits that speak to your life as well.
I do believe that there is something powerful about sharing our struggles and our learnings with each other. I think that there is a magic that happens inside of vulnerability and the outcome is often a sense of camaraderie and a knowing that we aren’t alone in this world. By sharing my journey, if in the smallest way, it might be encouragement to help you find your way through yours, nothing would make me happier.
This morning I sat down and read Bob Goff’s Live In Grace + Walk In Love devotional. It’s a good one that I’ve really been enjoying. Today’s topic was “When we see holes we’ve dug, God sees foundations he’s making. It spoke to the way that God allows holes to happen in our lives so that he use them to become foundations for new growth. That passage made me realize that today was the day I needed to write this.
Flash Back To The “Easy” Days
If I flash back to 2018, my life was in a place that I found to be beautiful, consistent and comfortable. Never could I have imagined the changes that lie ahead. For the first time in 12 years, my wonderful husband finally had weekends off after years of shift work and we found a little more time together. Our girls were both in school and for the first time in motherhood I was finding myself with uninterrupted time to work during the day. I was running a successful business as a wedding planner among a team of women I loved dearly. Finances were more stable than in early marriage and life was good. Crazy busy and often exhausting, but good. I felt like I was living my purpose and we were thriving.
I think that it is in these seasons of feeling as though we have it all figured out, God likes to give us little reminders of who is really in charge.
The Surprise Of Our Life
I woke up in early March 2019 to symptoms of what I could only explain as pregnancy. But that couldn’t be possible. I’d just been to the doctor the month before and my IUD was in top shape and still looked great after 7 years. I joked to Craig about how funny it would be if we were pregnant. We had always talked about having a third baby but felt that after having two beautiful girls and walking through miscarriage together, our family was complete. Besides, I was 35, we were finally comfortable in our life and really finding a groove. Our girls were 7 and 9 and in school and we had finally come out of the hazy years of sleepless nights and diapers. Precious years, but such hard ones.
I took a pregnancy test just to ease my mind and probably stood in that bathroom for 15 minutes just staring in disbelief at the two little lines emerging slowly. I was speechless. All at once I was wrapped up with overwhelming emotions - surprise, excitement, anxiety, fear and a million others. I sat there processing and wondering how this could be possible. I came out of the bathroom and Craig saw the look in my eye. He knew what the test had said. He had known me long enough to see right past through that phony smile of fake contentment I was trying to put on in front of our two girls as I nonchalantly said I had just been using the restroom. They say a baby changes everything, and this we knew to be true.
My mind filled with questions of how we would juggle three girls of such different ages. How we would go back to years of sleepless nights. How we would adjust our finally somewhat “easy” schedule. How we would afford it. How would I keep working? How my body might handle pregnancy 10 years later than it first did.
As I write this, am reminded of the shame I felt asking myself those questions. I had a belief that I should only feel sheer joy and excitement. That I wasn’t allowed to feel anything but that, knowing so many friends who tried for years to conceive. It didn’t feel fair to allow any emotions that weren’t completely positive to surface. But, in the moment, It felt as though we had run a race, crossed the finish line and were about to start all over again. I wasn’t sure how to do that.
Letting Go And Trusting God
After a number of days of disbelief and wondering, I took a deep breath, clung to God and realized that now was the time in my life to fully trust His plan for us. As days passed and my belly grew, something magical happened. I began to hear a very clear message of God assuring me that he always has the best plans. Our feelings of angst turned to feelings of sheer excitement. In sharing the news with our girls, they were overjoyed! (After all, they had been begging for a little sibling for 6 years.) They came to each ultrasound and the idea of our family of four growing into a family of 5 was all we could talk about.
In April, we took a trip to Ireland to visit my best friend Meredith. We had plans to tour all around Ireland for the first half and then we’d be off to London for the second week. The trip was wonderful beyond words. As our departure date for London approached, I woke up one morning to a sight that took me back - made me hold my breath and cling to God again. I was bleeding.
After a rollercoaster of emotions, I could not fathom losing this baby and having to walk through miscarriage with our girls so aware and so much a part of this pregnancy. We lost a baby between Makena and Corinne and it was one of the hardest experiences of my life. However, Makena was too young to understand at the time.
Again, I found myself on my knees, this time begging to carry this pregnancy through to the end. As if it wasn’t scary enough, they don’t handle pregnancy the same in Europe and finding a doctor willing to see me at only 10 weeks along was not possible. Bed rest was what my doctor at home told me was my only option and so that’s what I did. We didn’t get to see London and I spent a week fearing the worst but grateful to be in the company of my best friend and family. I prayed a million prayers until we touched down back in the US the next week.
As I kept being reminded, God has the best laid plans. We came home to test results that looked just fine and our miracle baby had just given us a scare. I cried tears of gratitude and relief.
Fast forward to the day before her birth and I heard God again. Loud and clear. Telling me that I needed to trust him and that he was preparing me for the hardest transition of my life thus far. I had a knowing that this birth wasn’t going to be easy and the road ahead was going to be rocky. My emotions wagered between fear and excitement and everything in between.
Our New Addition And The Hardest Chapter
We welcomed our Camilla Maxine on November 3, 2019 and she was perfection. With her eyes and nose the perfect resemblance of Makena and her mouth and chin just like Corinne’s, she was the missing piece to our family. All of the fear I had felt ceased and we were consumed with nothing but love and excitement. The c-section had gone according to plan and though I was struggling with extreme nausea following the anesthesia, the joy outweighed it. Until I began hemorrhaging.
I have never feared for my life in the way I did in that moment. All of the visions I had for our future flashed in my mind and I prayed to God to let it all be okay. A flood of nurses arrived and surrounded me, I handed Camilla to Craig, shaking and afraid I might lose consciousness, and was overcome by the worst fear I have ever felt. I just wanted it to stop and I wanted to feel normal. My head spun and ears rang. I desperately wanted to be soaking up these precious first few days with our baby girl, but here I was fearing for my life. Real fear that I might not get to leave the hospital with my precious family. I still have tears falling down my cheeks as I write this and remember those moments. It took months for me to be able to close my eyes and not re-live the trauma of what happened that day.
The bleeding was controlled and I did, obviously, get to leave the hospital eventually. With many iron prescriptions in hand, a diet of red meat ordered. Extremely anemic, full of anxiety that it might happen again and overly exhausted, we headed home.
Settling into a routine with three children in hand is challenging but when you are too weak to stand up on your own, it presents a whole new set of boundaries. The months that followed were ones of calling in all of the reinforcements to help make it through. My sweet husband handled the brunt of everything that needed to be done and my parents and in-laws came to stay and help him. Friends brought meals and we were in true survival mode.
When your immune system is already down, every little bug seems to get you and I struggled with a slew of challenges in the coming days. Influenza, an ulcer, an anaphylactic reaction to an MRI to try and figure out why I couldn’t eat without being sick and Mastitis three times. I spent four months in bed recovering and facing new challenges by the day. I spent days on end in prayer, begging God for some relief. I couldn’t eat and I had lost 60 lbs. Normally, my food loving self would celebrate that, but 60 lbs in 2 months postpartum wasn’t good. I’d lost all muscle and was not healthy. My stomach felt like it was a war zone after so many rounds of antibiotics had stripped away even the smallest trace of good bacteria left.
Rock Bottom
Slowly, the months crept by with tiny glimmers of good days every so often but mostly long stretches of illness. I was depressed and I knew it. I cried at a moments notice and was barely functioning. Unable to care for my children, I felt useless and hopeless and wondered when it would ever end. I spent days on end in bed grappling with questions of if my life was ending or if this would be a permanent state of life-long pain. I wearily looked into the eyes of my girls and longed to feel well enough to just play with them or be able to muster the strength just to make them a sandwich.
One afternoon while napping, something happened that I have never experienced before. As I drifted between sleep and wakefulness, I felt myself surrounded by a golden light and felt a hand on my back, directly on a place that had been excruciatingly painful for months. Immediately, I heard God telling me it would all be okay.
I had begged and prayed for a sign that things would be okay for months and it was the first experience in my life where I really felt God present with me in the room. It was the strangest experience that I will never forget. I questioned what I had experienced a number of times, but I knew in my soul, He had been there with me in that room. Though in the moment, things didn’t immediately change, over the course of the next month, my body did begin to heal.
I dug deep into education about healing our bodies through food and followed what I was reading. Day by day, I felt a little better and better and finally around month four I started to feel like myself. It was glorious! I began doing yoga daily, journaling again, focusing on food as fuel for my body and recognizing the imperative slow-down that is needed in order to heal. In order to maintain a sustainable pace in life.
And Then Our World Changed
If you do the math from November 2019 plus four months…you will find the exact date our world locked down due to COVID. Finally, standing on the edge of jumping back into real life, I found myself in a strange new world (like we all did) with two daughters to homeschool and a new baby.
Having just come up for air and ready to consider working again, this realization made my head swim. I had no idea how I would go back to running my business and managing my team, with a new baby in tow, homeschooling our daughters and in a very fragile state of health. I knew if I tried to do it all and maintain the pace I was used to, it would break me. Amidst this realization, I made the excruciatingly hard decision to close the doors to a business I had a spent a decade pouring myself into and building.
I wasn’t going to get to walk away with any kind of closure or big pay day or grandiose party. It felt like I was a child at the fair walking with a prized balloon that was all of the sudden swept away in the breeze. I was angry and unsettled but I knew that I had no choice. I remembered all of those clear messages from God about how I would need to cling to him through change and I sure felt tested. I won’t lie, this transition for me came with varying levels of anger followed by frustration, followed by anger. It didn’t really feel fair to have to give up something I loved and had built but I knew I had to do it.
I have always believed in keeping an identity that is not tied to being a wife or mom but is just about the woman I am. My business was that for me and it felt like I was giving that up.
Gaining A New Understanding
Months passed and as my strength returned, I began to awaken to the realization of how God had given us Camilla to spark that change that I needed in my life, in our life. To switch our focus from work to togetherness and family. To value my time more. To care for myself more. To remind us to carve out a slower pace and to find fulfillment in the wonder we see in the eyes of our children. It was in this time that I realized that the success I thought I was finding in my business was not nearly as valuable as the success I found in the moments at home with the people that mattered most.
I realized just how quickly life was passing and how fleeting these moments with young babies at home are. Long, (often hard) days, had become short years. I grappled with the realization of how off-balance my life had been. In my mind, then, I knew I worked hard and was working long, exhausting hours and not making an income nearly worth my efforts. But I justified that knowledge with the fact that it allowed me to work from home and have a flexible schedule. And the success of my business, on the outside, was a source of pride.
I never took a minute to stop long enough, be still and recognize the burnout that I was living. I knew that this forced slow down was my chance to make a change. This was God breaking through my stubborn resistance and telling me enough was enough.
I fully admit I am not the best stay at home mom. Don’t get me wrong, I love my children with every ounce of me. But I am happiest when I have a balance of at home time and time where I feel like I am making forward progress in the world of adulthood. However, in this new season, I began to find fulfillment in my days at home and an enlightenment in the small moments.
We somehow settled into a homeschool routine that was sub-par at best, but as good as it could be with a new baby at home. I poured through books and podcasts about building health through food, desperate to keep my health optimal after months of misery and overwhelming anxiety about death and my quality of life. I never realized how much I took my good health for granted until it wasn’t.
Jumping In To The Fire Again
And then, just as routine seemed to begin to return, we caught a new wave of change. News of a massive apartment complex being built in our back yard. It would certainly change what was once a contended family neighborhood, that slowly over time had become more geared toward college student rentals, into a fully different scene than we envisioned raising our children in the midst of.
We had always dreamed of life on acreage for our family one day, in our forever home, but it seemed crazy to move in the middle of a pandemic, with a new baby while homeschooling our girls, with no actual plan of where to go. Besides, how could we ever afford something like that. However, after months of lessons in listening and trusting God we felt him move our heart to trust Him and do it.
All of the pieces were in order. I wasn’t working for the first time in my adult life, school was remote and real estate was hot. We prayed on it and finally took the plunge. We listed our home and it sold in three days.
We packed up our life and moved into my grandparents old house, next door to my dad, which just happened to need a tenant. This home is small and forces togetherness, whether we like it or not. Most days, fortunately, we find it sweet.
Some days, when the clamour of children is too much, I take a deep breath, do my best to shift my perspective and remember that this is such a fleeting season with them young. But, the bigger knowledge that God is moving mountains in our life, even if we didn’t know what they were when we sold our home, keeps me content. The 30 minute commute to school twice a day is more bearable knowing He has great plans and this is our transition time.
In this same season, I was offered a position working with Wander Design + Rentals as Director of Event Management. We knew I couldn’t stay home forever and the position seemed like a good fit. The role was to help them expand into offering planning and design services to their clients. It was part time, allowed me to work from home, build and support our team on the back end and not have to be on the ground every weekend working events. I had known Cara and Sara, the owners of Wander for years and admired them greatly. This position would allow me use the skills I had built over the past decade, and give us the balance we needed in our life.
The Challenge Of Buying Land And Building
We searched and searched for the perfect piece of land and after working through the extensive research that it takes to make sure a piece of land is suited to build, struck out twice. Wondering if we had made a mistake after months of searching, my sweet dad happened to find the most perfect gem for us.
A 10 acre parcel just south of Lake Samish with views of the hills, a pond, towering evergreens and plenty of room for the kids to run. An asking price far below its value and the possibility that we could build a life here that we dreamed of. We had been hoping for an acre or two and this promised so much more. Stepping foot on to this land, a former dairy farm, we knew in our bones it was home.
Immediately we put an offer in and prayed. Our offer was accepted but it would be a long road ahead. This property was in the middle of being subdivided - a process that can take months. Originally a 30 acre farm, the seller was subdividing it into three 10 acre parcels. He would build on one, as would his daughter and he was selling the other to us.
The subdivision process, we quickly learned, is a giant headache. One that causes many heartaches, anger, an incredible amount of frustration, and relentlessly tests every ounce of your patience. You will, undoubtedly, question your decision to ever do something like this and wager the idea of just buying an already built home a gazillion times. However, after waiting a full year, the subdivision was finally complete and so our sale was finally solidified.
The Celebration Of A Lifetime
September 10th, we toasted a glass of champagne on that farm. Our farm. Our home. Though there was no actual home there, with the exception of a run down old farm house that could creep out even the bravest soul, it was home. We felt a connection with this place from the moment we set foot on it and our future immediately began to take shape.
I cried so many tears that day. I fell to my knees on that land and thanked God for his perseverance. For forcing holes in my life in order to build foundations on them. For giving me my health back. For helping my change my perspective on so many things in life. For teaching me more lessons about my faith in him in two years than I had learned my whole life long.
Initially, in our search for acreage, we had just hoped to just have a little more room for our children to run. However, we see how God is now leading us down a different path. We know that this place has too much promise to keep to ourselves. With Craig’s childhood spent farming and my love of design, we have been creating plans to turn our farm into a place that is so much more.
A Future We Never Could Have Imagined
It will be a place where our girls can trade in screen time for time outdoors, where dirts is just part of the everyday wear, where we can cultivate gardens that they learn to help tend and learn the value of growing their own food. Where we are able to get back to the roots of what life is really supposed to be about.
But, it will also be a place where we can create opportunities to nourish and support our community. A place that fosters togetherness and sharing abundance and providing a respite for anyone who visits. A place for long dining tables filled with community and love. Where fresh produce and gardens overflowing with flowers bring joy to a reach far beyond ourselves. A place we never, ever want to leave and a place we can’t help but share.
Understanding The Greatest Lessons Are Usually The Hardest
After what has felt like a blind search for a long time, I now recognize the reasons for it all. And as I flash back to so many conversations with God through the challenge of the past three years - where I questioned why every piece of my life felt as if it were in a transition or extra hard or I begged for some clarity and solid footing - I finally see that he was shaping our life into what it is supposed to be.
Our Farm And Big Dreams
And, though we are just beginning this process of building our farm - something I never dreamed we would be doing - I can see how it is the perfect epicenter to share the unique gifts God has blessed us each with.
With a childhood of farming behind him, watching Craig sail around on the tractor preparing the land for different uses lights a spark in him I have never seen before. Allowing him to lead our growing efforts will foster a new and beautiful relationship between the two of us. One where I can celebrate his past and allow him to teach me.
My design centric mind is on a high brainstorming all of the things we can do here and all of the opportunities for creating - from gardens to workshops to larger dreams and experiences for our community - I can see it all. He in turn relishes in my dreams and finds ways to support them.
Above all, we know we will face challenges and hardships here, just as anywhere in life, but we are grateful to enter this new chapter full of faith in His plan and we are training our ears to try and listen. We know it won’t all happen overnight and that we will take things a small step at a time, but we are hopeful, excited and ready to learn. I cannot wait to look back at this blog post in a few years and see what we have done.
The Biggest Lessons I Have Learned
I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the major life lessons I have learned this past few years. These years have been the most transformative years of my life and I know it is important to not let what is fresh in my mind become diluted over time.
Trust God’s plan for your life and listen to him
Even if you can’t hear well, do your best to understand that voice and the stirring in your heart. I guarantee it will lead you to greater things thank you could ever imagine.
Take care of your body and your well-being
Slow the heck down! Make time for rest. Eat good food. Grow your own food. Support your local farmers. Teach your kids about the importance of it all. Move your body. Do yoga. Breathe.
Focus your efforts on the important things in life
Spend time with those you love. As much of it as you can. Hug your kids more. Make-out with your spouse more. Call your parents. Tell a friend you are thinking of them. Love is the most important of all. Spread it like confetti. I promise you’ll never run out!
Say No
I’m a serial over-committer. I love to think I can do it all and I try to until I reach burn-out. I’ve learned that I can’t live a life like that and I’ve learned that saying no is a good thing. It doesn’t mean I am missing out, it means that I have more time for the really important things.
Grow where you are planted
When you can’t control your circumstances, find ways to thrive through them. In the hard, cling to the goodness. In seasons of greatness, share your joy. Find beauty in exactly where you are, right now. And don’t be afraid to be an eternal optimist.
Never be afraid of change and growth
Change is inevitable. Some of it is hard, some of it less so. But each change in our life gives us an opportunity to re-focus our priorities and grow. And as Bob Goff reminded me this morning…every hole in our life is an opportunity for God to create a foundation for growth.
Thanks For Sticking With Me
These three years have changed me and I have grown more over them than perhaps in my entire lifetime. And I sure as heck am about to grow a whole lot more these next few years as I learn how to build a house, how to garden and so much more. But, I am entering this season open to learning everything and anything and with the knowledge that the ability to adapt is perhaps one of the strongest abilities we possess, even when it is hard.
If you are still reading this with me, thank you for journeying through these past couple of years. It was an important reflection I needed to take and I hope that perhaps through this saga of a blog post, you might be able to find some helpful points that are reflected in your life as well.
So, here’s to life, to adaptation, to listening to God, to learning and to love. We are so lucky to be able to learn through the hard and come out stronger on the other side. Life truly is a gift.
