Asking

The summer after I graduated from high school, I took a (very long) bus trip across Pennsylvania to visit a friend and her husband and their 6-month old son. Every day, the husband would leave for work and my friend and I would fill our days with visiting and caring for the baby.

Every day, she would make lunch -- pita bread pockets with tuna salad, a handful of potato chips, some fruit. Every day, like a loop of film that plays over and over yet again, she would make her lunch and sit and eat, with no real enjoyment, it seemed to me. Even as an 18 year old, I could sense that she was struggling with missing her old routine (she was someone who was used to being in the workplace) and the desire to create a routine in her new role. She was looking for meaning in her life -- in a town she had just moved to, in the midst of rather isolated days.

I feel that way -- that I'm seeking a new routine to fill my days, isolated from the people I spent many waking hours with. Occasionally, I still mentally "ping" my old workplace. I dreamed last night that I showed up and worked 4 hours before they called security and reminded me that I no longer work there and would have to leave.

Even though I've struggled to find a new routine, I really think I could want this -- staying home. I want to work only 20 hours a week, at most -- around my girls' school schedules. I don't want 40 hours in a cubicle every week again. I don't want to go back to someone else getting my girls off the bus.

The loop of my days is knitting the fabric of my family -- cooking, folding laundry, cutting coupons. Checking homework. Studying for the science test. I could get used to this.

I woke up in the middle of the night in mid-prayer -- I had been praying in my sleep. So I let myself do something I've been terrified to do until then: I prayed and asked God for something specific. That, if it be God's will, I'd really love to be able to let Husband carry the benefits and the financial burden and I would carry the family/homestead burden.

I found myself in tears last week at the thought of praying specifically for this -- for fear of hearing NO and for fear of the unknown. I know that God is watching His plan come together in our lives. Someday, I'll know what that plan is. And I finally have been brave enough to let God know what I'd really like my part to be in this.

"It was not you who chose me but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he may give you" -- John 15:16