The phone call (part 6 of Our Arctic Adventure)

part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5



Monday afternoon the phone rang.



It was my dad.



No big deal, right?



Wrong.



You see I could count on my hands the number of times my dad has called me. Only because he is a man of few words and the fact that I call my parents often enough that he never really needed to call me for anything.



I answered the phone and we proceeded to have a great conversation. Ever since the day we told my parents about our move, my dad had been very excited. He's kind of an adventurer and at one point in his marriage he actually also packed up his family and moved them from Washington to Alaska, which is how I and my younger sister came to be born in Anchorage. He was excited about our new adventure and he and I spent the next thirty minutes looking online at different websites with information about Kotzebue. Just before he and I hung up he said something that spoke very loudly to me.

He said; "So, why aren't you all moving together at the end of the month?"

So I kind of stammered back; "ummm, well, we want to leave Ben in school until the end of the year."

To which my dad replied; "oh, well, I think you are making a mistake. I think that you all should be leaving together at the end of the month. You should get there and get the boys in school so that they have time to make friends before summer. The world does not revolve around Ben and you all need to be together."

This caught me completely off guard for two reasons. First of all, how did he know I was struggling with this very issue? I had said nothing to anyone, after all I was strong and independent. Secondly, in all my years of marriage (nearly 15), this is the FIRST time my dad has EVER offered his unsolicited advice. Like I said, my dad is a man of very few words, and butting into other peoples lives is not his thing. Yet here he was speaking to me about the very heart issue that I was struggling with. He didn't know. As a matter of fact, I didn't even tell him at that moment. I'm not even sure to this day that he knows.

We hung up the phone and I immediately the tears started flowing again. I sat there and bawled and bawled. What were we going to do? It was in that very moment that I realized that, although we were doing what we believed God wanted us to do, we were trying to do it according to OUR plan and not GOD'S plan.

In that moment I experienced something that I have rarely experienced. Complete brokenness.
I had no idea what the next step was. I had no idea where to start. I had no idea how this would all work. I had no control. And there I sat, crying and crying.

It didn't take me to long to figure out what the next step was: Pray. (yeah I'm smart like that)

Pray and surrender. Admit that I wasn't in control (and never really was) and ask God to show me what the next step for us should be. So pray I did, and immediately I knew what needed to be done. I needed to talk to Dave about this whole thing.

When Dave got home that evening, I barely let him walk through the door when I said "I need to talk to you."

I told him all of the struggles that I had been having about staying in Washington without him, and I told him about the conversation with my dad. Then he told me about a conversation that he had had with some good friends about this very issue and about how hard it would be on our marriage to be apart for that three months. We hashed it all out, we talked about all the work that would need to be done in order for us all to be able to leave in less than four weeks, and most importantly we prayed.

After that conversation, I felt peace. Yes, I still had this crazy long list of things to accomplish in the next four weeks and my husband would still be working during this time, so most of it I had to do without much assistance from him, but he was there to help when he could. However, I also had peace in my heart. Peace that I had not felt for a very long time. Peace that came from realizing that God was asking us to go; all of us at the same time to step out on the (frozen!) waters together.

Peace that I knew came from following God's plan......................

TO BE CONTINUED