making the best

When we were Texans, we loved the carpets of spring bluebonnets and the spectacle and swagger of the Rodeo and the brash, confident attitude of people from the Lone Star State, in spite of the long shadow cast by flooding from Hurricane Harvey. Our house was within walking distance to an ice cream shop, a donut shop, as well as lots of auto repair shops, so you see, we almost had it all.

When we were Texans, we were able to see our friends Ole and Margaret an average of more than once a month for sightseeing, water fun, s’mores, and, of course, board games. Somehow we managed to work a lot of Margaret’s amazing cakes in there, too.

When we were Texans, Mystery turned two on Mother’s Day and we themed her little party on one of her favorite books, If You Give A Mouse a Cookie. She got a stuffed Mouse and a large stuffed chocolate chip cookie that she likes to jam into Mouse’s face every morning when she wakes up.

When we were Texans, we visited the home of the last president of Texas when it was a country and the site of the Alamo. Percy, like many little boys before him, fell in love with Davy Crockett and his motivational speeches. If Percy ever conquers his temper and his strong-willed behavior, he is going to be an amazing inspirational leader.

When we were Texans, Percy turned six, and he had a lovely birthday with balloons, a water park, an incredible Minecraft cake, s’mores, Legos, and friends.

So Percy got some snazzy roller skates for his birthday. When we took him to a roller rink to try them out, I also rented skates and immediately fell down backward on my palms and broke my wrist. This led to a very trippy ER visit to try and set my bone that night, and eventually surgery a few days later to get the angle corrected with a titanium plate and screws. I could not pick up Mystery, so we asked Nana to come visit and help out for a few weeks, and she was such a blessing!

While we were Texans, we lived in the city in which we met, on the 20^th anniversary of our marriage. This occurred right after I broke my arm, so the celebration was low-key, but we are planning to go on a cruise later this year to commemorate it fully!

While we were Texans, we enjoyed visits from friends and family and trips to the water wall, the Houston space center, and Discovery Green. We got to reconnect with old Rice friends and get to know their beautiful children.

When we were Texans, we visited seven churches before we found the right one, but we enjoyed aspects of all of them. Our finally-chosen church (Sojourn Spring Branch) is a young church plant that is solidly focused on living the gospel and loving our neighborhood. They usually serve grape juice for communion, but sometimes surprise us with wine. They worship in a former Fiesta Mart grocery store less than 10 minutes’ walk from our house (right by the donut shop). We will miss them. This is Mystery with the pastor and his wife (expecting twins).

When we were Texans, we lived 11 hours’ drive away from my parents, 18 hours from John’s mom, and 19 hours from John’s stepmom. The distance really began to weigh on us when my parents had trouble driving to see us, and even more when I broke my wrist. We lived in the same city as my sister, but she has job obligations that keep her schedule tied up so we didn’t get to see her very often.

When we were Texans, Mystery started talking up a storm. She just started saying the word “need,” as in “I need …” and fills the ends of the sentence with the name of a TV show. She also began spinning—the kind where she winds up like a pitcher and whips all the way around in one rapid motion. The concentration required for this is intense. She also loves buses and trucks and the funny vehicles in Richard Scarry books. Like the Pigeon, she wants to drive the bus, and she does not see why she shouldn’t!

When we were Texans, we lived in a partly-renovated 1960s rental home in Spring Branch. It had a sunny, grassy, fenced backyard with room to swing and play, but from the street our house had zero curb appeal, so I bought brightly-colored plastic windmill flowers to cheer it up. It was partly for the house, but also quite a bit for myself, because “make the best of it” was the name of the game while we were Texans.

About a week before we found out we were moving, the City of Houston repaired a section of our rental’s pitted and potholed driveway, which significantly improved the bumpy terrain as well as the house’s curb appeal. Being gifted a perfectly smooth path right at the end of our Texas experience was also what happened for John professionally.

As John wrote in his last post, about two weeks into his first Houston job John knew it was impossible to remain there. Who knows if the legal team vigorously defending his former boss’s reputation is still trolling our blog, but suffice it to say that it was, for John, a very short job disaster.

God provided a new financial job for John that gave him a way out of the first one. We started with a lot of hope and tried to think of it as our Houston restart. But again, by a few weeks in, John knew he was not a good fit for his new company. They were ethical, professional, and kind; however, they believed they could beat the market with active portfolio decisions, and emphasized performance reporting without any kind of financial planning.

As he struggled with the professional disconnect, John realized how closely his personal philosophy on financial advice matched BlueSky Wealth Advisors, where he worked for seven years in North Carolina. He regretted leaving them to go to Texas with the naive expectation that it would be easy to find a similar financial planning company.

The only thing worse than looking for another job a month after starting a new one is looking for a third job a couple months later. But thankfully, John’s former BlueSky boss invited him to rejoin them as a Senior Wealth Advisor, initially working from home as he lays the foundation for what may one day be an Atlanta branch of BlueSky. John discovered the hard way that not all Registered Investment Advisors are cut from the same cloth, and with BlueSky he can do the comprehensive planning he values with the co-workers he already knows and respects.

When we were Texans, John’s work situations were extremely stressful and kept us from feeling like we could truly settle in. It was a challenge for me to realize how much my identity is wrapped up in certain things that God allowed to be cut off in this season. One was my house. We tried to not hang much up on the walls of the rental, and we kept about a third of our stuff unpacked because we did not know how long we were staying. I didn’t have the ability to express myself or lift my mood through decorating, and we had no idea when we would be able to buy a house and settle in to a neighborhood. Even being cut off from seeing my books, which stayed in boxes, was strange. It felt like I lost part of my personal mental history, just not having the titles as part of my background scenery.

When I was at the ER for my broken wrist, they gave me anesthesia that they told me would make me have weird dreams while they worked on setting my bone. It actually had an awful effect of making me imagine I was being broken down into tiny molecular components and losing my identity—even forgetting my children. It was disorienting and terrifying. All I could remember was the name, Jesus. It was the only thing that was left after the rest of me was gone.

After that experience, I struggled not to feel isolated at home in Houston. Our homeschool group did not meet during the summer, so my new friendships there began to feel distant, and we had taken so long to find a church that we did not have very deep relationships there, either. Somehow, losing all these factors—house, books, friends, not to mention my whole identity for a short time during the ER experience!—made me realize how I get my sense of self from these external things like parenthood, relationships, my house, my mental experiences. I really want my identity to be rooted in Christ, and what He has done, but instead of becoming more gloriously focused on Him in the absence of these other aspects, I felt like a much weaker, fainter version of myself, and I felt my passion for God was weaker, too. I think I felt a little bit of what I imagine a refugee must feel who is forced to leave everything behind and construct a new life, quickly and out of necessity, that is not as richly reinforced with relationships and personal history and the sense of home as her original life. When I was a Texan, it was hard to hold onto who I was before that. I guess I need deeper roots to be healthy.

In the end, God has smoothed the way and worked our situations out to be better than we could have hoped for: John gets to work from home in Atlanta (which is much closer to both of our families), for a company that he respects, and doing a job that he enjoys and excels at with even greater confidence than before we got to Texas. And I will get to be in a house, our own house, where I can teach my kids and put down roots and form relationships and renew old habits that will hopefully help us grow and walk with Jesus for the long term. We are packing now, moving in a few days, buying a house in Acworth, Georgia next week, and starting a new homeschool year with a local Classical Conversations campus.

When we were Texans, we had a bit of a tough season, but we tried to make the best of it; and we know that God is working all things, even the hard things, for our good.