Living on a Prayer

I’m sitting here, in the rig, and the rain is pouring down outside. We did our every-few-months purge this morning. The purge means we weed through the cupboards tossing the less essentials and make sure everything has a “home”. 

While the hubs and I were weeding, he found a wood puzzle that is a map of America. We bought it before we left Seattle, thinking it would be good for the kids to learn our country, state by state. 

The hubs gave them a challenge to see who could put together the puzzle the fastest, and timed them putting it together. The first attempt of one of them was nearly 9 minutes. That was about 4 hours ago. Now that same child clocked in at 3:17 (The hub’s high score is 1:51). The competition is fierce.

During the last four hours they’ve gotten creative with their puzzle assembly. Now one person is blindfolded, and the other has to direct them to get the pieces in the right place. 

I love to see them excited about learning! Especially on a rainy day like today, when they would most likely be watching tv or playing video games. It’s times like these that make me feel like we could do this forever. Not that we’re perfect at it, but we learn and grow as time goes on and it gets easier. 

The biggest shift is not really knowing what’s up ahead, and leaning into that feeling of uncertainty.

We have always been big planners and liked having a blueprint that organized our hopes and dreams into a reality. We don’t have that right now. We can take time off from work pretty much whenever we want — which is awesome — but we don’t know where our next contract will take us. 

We have faith that our Heavenly Father has a plan for us and His blueprint will take us where He wants us to go. We just have to trust that He knows best, that each contract location and unique experience will teach us a lesson we couldn’t learn anywhere else. 

We don’t even know where we’re going to grow old! There is no current plan — only speculation — because its in the Lord’s hands.

Living on a prayer means that we can study out our options in our mind, pray to be shown the angles of each choice, and settle on preferred plan of action. Then, after doing the mental work ourselves, we ask Heavenly Father if that is the right decision.

Sometimes it seems like we’re onto something, that all systems are go, and we get a “no” answer from the Lord. It’s awkward when that happens.

However, through the “no’s” and “yes’s” we’ve developed trust in our Heavenly Father’s timing and His plan. In fact, we’ve developed so much trust that we’ve become quite comfortable leaning into the uncertainty of our future.

In the meantime, we will continue challenging our children’s limits and show them the world the best we are able. Hopefully someday they will have a better grip on all this stuff that us.

Until that day, the time to beat is 1:51. Good luck, kids.