Celebrate the Shifts

In 1997, I was a stay-at-home mom of six children, ages two through fifteen, when I received an invitation from our pastor to attend a three-day conference in Chicago.

The conference was aimed at attracting and keeping twenty and thirty-year-olds into churches. Our bishop had instructed him to attend with one parishioner and then write a report.

The problem is that the pastor was also supposed to spend part of that weekend at his college reunion in another state. 

So the plan was for us to attend the conference together for half of that time and then I would stay overnight in Chicago for the last day (because I had transportation issues even back then).

At the end of that second day, before I headed to dinner, I went back to my room for a short while just to listen to music and celebrate the shift that had occurred in my life.

Now, I didn't know that by the following year, I'd be a single mother working several jobs around the clock, growing them all to see which ones "stuck."

I didn't know three years later I'd be remarried and living near the I&M Canal.

I didn't know five years later I'd be fighting for my life with a tumor so rare most people (including me) had never heard of it.

I didn't know eight years later we'd hold a ribbon-cutting in our backyard for the remodeling of three outbuildings as dedicated youth group space for our church.

And so forth.

But what I did feel was that shift in my life, a shift I've sensed at other times, too.

Honestly, to this day, I have no idea why I was selected for this conference. I wasn't part of any church group, church board, church anything, except for my attendance.

However, before grabbing my book and heading for a solitary dinner (that sounds lonesome until you reflect that dinners at home meant eating with a nursing baby on your lap and periodically jumping up to refill plates and run general interference among bickering children), I took a few moments to acknowledge that, to honor that, to even celebrate that.

The unknown is often a scary place.

But it's also an opportunity for growth.