Breathless Haste

I lived in pity-party mode for about a year, and then I decided to fully invest myself in our new life. I am not sure what made me flip the switch, but a year seemed long enough to wallow in the homesickness and sadness. Eugene Peterson also wrote these words about someone in exile: “The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible—to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty and act out love.”13 It was time for me to turn outward and live deeply.

While there was something sad about starting all new friendships from scratch, it was also exciting to see whom God placed on my path and how He might weave those relationships together. One afternoon, while I was at the elementary school’s playground with William, I met a mother and her son. Much like the way I blurted out to the woman with the baby at McDonald’s, I found myself saying to this mom, “We just moved here, and I don’t know anybody!” That one conversation led to many more. It was the beginning of a deep and sweet neighborhood friendship between two moms and two sons who became best friends. We invited their family to church, and they began to go with us. Almost weekly, on Saturday nights we would drive our minivan to their home just half a block from our house, they would pile in, and off we would go for the fifteen-minute ride to church, chatting it up all the way there.