I’m sitting in a hotel room in downtown Sydney wondering what the hell I’m doing.

Last week, The Kid and Little Brother and I were driving to TK’s school, our typical frenetic routine in place. I was yearning for some peace, some reassurance about the trip that The Husband and I would be making in a few days: a frenetic plan itself, globe-hopping to another hemisphere, the upside-down to our right-side-up, fourteen hours ahead and half a world away. I was wondering if we should update our will (we don’t have a will), get it in writing that The Sis would take our kids if something happens to us (I think I have an email or text somewhere to that effect), spending my last moments before drifting off to sleep suddenly and consumingly grateful for the mere feet separating me from my sleeping sons in their beds across the hall. On this morning, desperate and hungry for peace, I looked ahead through the windshield and saw the light through the trees. I stopped breathing for a second.

All down the road ahead of me, rays of light cast their beams, waves and particles gathering visibly only because they were traveling through something–spaces between leaves, around branches, dusty pollinated air, gray and scattered clouds. Blake’s verse came to mind, the one that can’t leave me even when my grocery list and name do: “And we are put on earth a little space/That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”

We feel that we are being called to a different space by a love that operates outside of our comfort zones, our familiar patches of geography, our personal plans. Cut to me crying alone in a Sydney hotel room, wondering if I’m reading that calling correctly.

I moved to New York eleven years ago in an act of desperation that could have been interpreted as reckless; my father sure thought it was after that first tax return. I came away from that island with a newfound faith, enduring friendships, and a husband. Not bad for five years’ exile. Now I’m sitting on an island that is a continent that is ten times as far from home as New York was, only this time around I have two boys and their lives to consider. Am I being stupid? Is this even doable? I went to lunch this morning with a fellow mom who fits all the parameters of New Friend; TH and I stopped by for a glass of wine last night with a New York acquaintance whose husband is a pastor here. I ALREADY HAVE A PASTOR. TWO IN FACT. I LIKE THEM VERY MUCH, GOD. WHY ARE YOU MESSING WITH THAT? We talked and laughed last night; today we ate and related, and it was all quite pleasant, and now I want to throw up, because this is getting very real. How is TK going to react to such a colossal, daily change? Am I giving him enough credit, or just using him as an excuse? Can someone time travel three years into the future and let me know that this is the best thing we ever did so that I can finally have a normal poop and a peaceful night’s sleep?

This all may sound very ungrateful coming from someone who is being afforded the opportunity to live within minutes of beautiful beaches in year-round temperate weather on a company’s dime. But this is how I need to process such a change, through the highs and lows of emotional recognition, the nausea-inducing taxi ride from the airport (I do know this from thirty-nine years of life: never interpret a city based on the ride from the airport) and the run along the harbor with the view of the Opera House and botanical gardens. I need to ride the waves that are appearing to lift us out of the life we know and into the one we are called to, the one being written by a love whose beams I am constantly relearning how to endure, a love that sends me on a reckless trip halfway across the world and gathers clouds just so I can see its light on a typical Tuesday morning, leaving the path we’re on full of so many unknowns even while the road ahead is scattered with illumination.