And so it goes...

Tension headaches. Knots in my shoulders. Unable to fall asleep at night. Unable to wake up in the morning. Mind running 100mph in 50 different directions.

We’ve decided that we’re moving in 7 weeks. Our U-Haul is booked. It’s official. And I’m officially stressed. I think I deal with stress pretty well. I get really quiet and tend to zone out (more than usual). It’s not like I get crabby or impatient. Unless you know me, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that I’m stressed. And that’s the way I like it.

I do take some action when I am stressed, though. I don’t just sit quietly idle with a zoned out look on my face. So what do I do? Well, I clean as much as I can. I play with numbers (our term for budgeting). I think A LOT. I write. And mostly I try to organize all the chaos in my mind by making lists. Lots and lots of lists.

Lists put into order that which was previously without order. It allows me to see 10 different thoughts, in one place, which were previously going in 10 different directions in my mind. The first thing lists do for me is they allow me to see that all the chaos isn’t really chaos at all. Everything is manageable. They also allow me to place check-marks beside different tasks as I complete them until everything is checked off (thus making life seem, again, more manageable).

So if you were to look in my house, in the first drawer to the left of the fridge, you would find three lists that I made this morning:

List #1 – Things to do before work (real estate agent coming at 11am).
List #2 – Things to do today (in general).
List #3 – Things to do everyday to be ready at a moment’s notice for someone to look at the house.

And the only reason these lists are laying haphazardly in my “junk drawer” instead of neatly in a row on the island is that we listed our house with a real estate agency today! (I doubt that random papers make a house look more inviting or homey or like you might want to buy it.)

As you can see, Nathan and I made some decisions yesterday. After a long talk about prayer and guidance and free will and faith and miracles and the way God works…we made some decisions.

Decision #1 – we would list our house before the end of the week.

Decision #2 – we will be moving to Saskatchewan on July 1, whether the house sells by then or not.

And that’s about the time my huge shoulder-knots showed up. The headaches and weird sleep routines had been around already, but those knots are something else!

I almost sat down right then and wrote out 20 pages of lists and thoughts…but I waited until this morning and only wrote what I needed right then. I think I’ll have to do some organizing of my thoughts when I get home from work today too, but wow. Big things are happening! Aah!!! (yes, dear friends, that was a 3-exclamation mark “Aah!!!”)

I am feeling excited. I am feeling nervous. I am feeling stressed. But it is good. Maybe, before I try to take control of the situation with my lists and organizing, I should just stop for a while and be ok with not being in control this time. I don’t always need to be in control. I have a feeling that there are some valuable lessons to be learned in just sitting back and saying, “Yes, Abba, I trust you.” Hmm…perhaps that is exactly what I will do…