I know this move is what we were meant to do to bring us where we are meant to be. God opened every door that needed to be opened and provided everything we needed to make our dream a reality. Our new life and home are the fruit of years of trusting and waiting on God’s timing.
I love our new home. There is still some stuff that needs to be sorted, but we will get there.
The broken ankle was a stick in the spokes of my idea of what arriving and exploring would look like.
It has kept me housebound for the most part. The 2 flights of stairs to our apartment stand like a mountain in front of me each time we go out – a mountain I can, at this point, hop up one stair at a time. And my innate clumsiness poses a risk of hurting myself further.
I might be going a little stir crazy, however not to the extent of mustering the resolve to climb down and then later up the stairs. So at home I am.
For the last week or two, there has been a tugging at my heart – the figurative one. It’s not the type of tug I get when watching a sad movie or hearing a song that reminds me of simpler times.
There used to be only one tug; however, more were added. The very first one is a thread leading to a wonderfully weird and wise woman, who skipped my defense and hopped straight into the best friend position.
Somehow or sometime between the bonding over musicals, coffee, and inside jokes, she chipped off a piece of my heart with a thread still connected to me and kept it close ever since. When she moved across the country to start the next chapter of her life, it was the first time I felt the tug. The thread that spans cross-country and the piece of my heart that is permanently tucked away in her heart.
Flash forward a couple of years to now, when it was my family’s turn to start our new adventure – our much-anticipated move across the country. I’m no closer to my bestie than I was before we moved. According to Google Maps, we are actually further apart.
During the move, I left behind two more pieces of my heart and uncoiled two additional threads to two different hearts.
These threads are a dozen or more degrees right of my OG bestie to my other two best friends who remain in the city we left in the rearview. The one thread leads to a beautiful mommabear who modeled what love, nurturing, and being a mom are long before she had baby bears of her own.
The other thread leads to an unexpected older sister (not by blood) who taught me kindness even in the face of undoing and how to paint the world around her with her overflowing compassion and vibrance, she may not realise she has.
Being confined makes me feel the tug of the three threads constantly reverberate in my heart in everything I do. As long as my mind keeps reminding me of the distance, I will keep reminding my heart it wasn’t “goodbye”. It was just “see you later”.
As expected my husband had no problem making friends wherever he goes. It comes so naturally to him. His outgoingness and confidence are two of the many characteristics of him that I adore. And I wish I had more of either of them. He made his first friend the night we arrived and now with the neighbour that just moved in – how does he do that?!
I know my ankle eventually will be better, climbing the stairs will be simple once again, and we will go places where I will have the opportunity to find friends.
But for now, my hands are firmly wrapped around the warmth of those three threads as I wait on the Lord for my own outgoingness and confidence when meeting the friends He already hand-picked for me.
Shattered Warrior 