“It is madness to wear velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.” –Annie Dillard

When I was growing up in the church, I gravitated toward any event billed with a heading like “How to Know God’s Will for Your Life.” I would sit in the crowd at the youth group Bible study or retreat, pen in hand, hand poised above paper, and invariably I would leave disappointed and not a little angry. I felt snookered, EVERY TIME. Because instead of spurting out a list of tips or throwing up on the overhead projector (YES, I’M OLD) a bullet-pointed bevy of rules to follow, the speaker would toss out some mumbo jumbo about praying and reading the Bible.

I already do that, asshole, I thought (because, while being a Good Girl, I was also a jerk). I do that religiously, I would add (because, while insecure, I also fancied myself quite witty). Still, I would leave said event empty-handed but for my own bitterness and sense of being lost.

I’d like to talk now about how we decided to move to Sydney.

Because I used to want life to add up to a list, and for that list to follow my own (shitty and small, it turns out) plan, I didn’t have room for any mystery or uncertainty. Following a list of rules was my shortcut, I felt, to the life I envisioned. To the one I secretly felt I’d earned. It wasn’t until years later (yesterday, I think) and exiles in the lands of New York and Motherhood that the truth, like Jesus said it would, began to finally set me free–but, like Gloria Steinem added, first it would piss me off.

All of which is to say that I’ve had a willingness to abide mystery and uncertainty gracefully and brutally loved into me, and my body is finally backing down on its autoimmune response against it. But honestly, every time I think I’ve gotten the message, that I’m there, thanks, a new level opens to the whole thing. And what I initially interpret as just plain damn meanness on God’s part–an unsettling of my sense of home and comfort and place–always, ALWAYS turns into gift.

But not without the pissing off first.

Sydney first came on our radar last October. I was circling the track at the gym when The Husband called–during the workday, no less, so that I knew something was up. He explained that the company he works for had bought a business in Australia, and that a role may be vacated there. A role he could be asked to take.

“NOPE,” I believe I said. “WRONG NUMBER.”

Earlier that week I had gotten just as earth-shattering of a call from The Sis, who told me that I would be receiving a new niece or nephew in about eight months. We had been at our church for six months, enough time to feel blessedly in place and build relationships that included texting bitmojis and exchanging good-natured profanity with our pastor. The Kid was not speaking, but had just started a great school program and oodles of therapy, including weekly shit-soaked sessions at a horse barn, and I was not in a position to roll all that up in a bag and toss it in the trash. We were home. I informed TH and God that I would not be leaving.

The conversation seemed to end, due less to my petulance than to the role remaining filled, and TH and I would reference it occasionally as that crazy thing we (he) had considered doing.

Then it came back.

In late June, I had a brand new niece, a speaking son, and even deeper friendships and numerous bitmoji texts. That’s when TH sent me an email saying he had been offered the role (he knew better than to call this time, I guess). I remember exactly what I wrote: “If God wants us to pick up our lives and move halfway across the world in six months, he’s going to have to make it pretty damn clear.”

This is how I know there’s a God: there’s no way a nondescript, unspecific thing like “The Universe” could operate with as timely and sharp of a sense of humor.

For the next week, I shot glares across the dinner table at TH; he seemed to have already left for Sydney, his excitement palpable and incredibly annoying to me. Because of my own anger, my own sense of being abandoned for a foreign country, I couldn’t see the honor this was for him. I couldn’t see the opportunities it could afford us; I couldn’t see. And I couldn’t breathe. After a few solid days of raging around the house, even more short-tempered and bitchy than usual, I realized I couldn’t live like this. And my family shouldn’t have to. (I’m selfless like that.) I prayed for an open heart (for me) or a changed mind (for TH). And I waited.

I wrote about what happened next in my last post: how grace reached right into one of the most tender places in my heart, where my children reside, and showed me how it was preparing a place for us. For The Kid. And I recalled an email response I had gotten from a trusted friend and counselor back in October, when I had enlisted wisdom, about making such a huge decision, how it had said that maybe the decisions themselves are clear; after all, grace doesn’t hide–it’s we who don’t look. That maybe it’s the implications of the decisions that are hard. That we want to believe that if we are hearing our answer, it means the path will be easy–but the real roads never are. They’re much too…full for that.

“God is not a kindly old uncle,” goes a Jewish proverb, “He’s an earthquake.” Annie Dillard, above, would agree. And so would I, gazing from this vantage point at the way grace has upended my plans, destroyed my lists, broken all my rules, and tossed me around like a rag doll…it seems. But this holy destruction is part and parcel of what has turned my faith from a self-improvement exercise to a living, breathing thing. This relentless love, this grace-fueled devotion not to my comfort but to more, always more, painfully more…it laughs gently at the oft-quoted idea that faith is a crutch and reveals it instead to be life support. Oxygen. This is not the finding of a plan, but a relationship with a being. I am not memorizing items on a spreadsheet, but learning the scars of a hand, the workings of a heart. I’ve gone from doing research in a library–because even prayer and Bible-reading will only get you so far without the eyesight bestowed by grace–to riding the unpredictable waves of a love that won’t stop until I’m really home.

There is a grace that opens my heart, but doesn’t stop there: it opens my eyes to how it shows up everywhere, how it asks too much and so little at the same time, how it is written in every moment: the stomach viruses, the hospital visits, the painful and wonderful call to a beautiful new home. And I find myself wondering–in those moments when I let go of the lists and really piss off my adolescent self, who still lives inside me and is just aching for more rules to follow–wondering, what’s so bad about riding waves anyway, terrifying and exhilarating as they are, when you know they’re not going to sink, but save you?