This past Friday, I was stuffing 9×12 envelopes with query letters and addressing them to agents around the city as the BF was on the phone being interviewed for a job in a different city. Within a few hours, my letters were dropped in the mailbox on the corner of 29th and 2nd, and the BF was asked to fly down to Atlanta for an official interview.

For both matters, prayers ensued.

One thing about belief is that it outlaws coincidence.  So the fact that I had requested representation from multiple New York agents at the moment a new, near-immediate timeline emerged for us to leave the city is not relegated to the realms of irony, but somehow constitutes further evidence of God’s humor-infused yet always-perfect timing.  I have borne witness for awhile now to the counter-intuitive, paradoxical nature of my brand of faith: virgin birth, life from death, strength through weakness–and to the ways it has played out in my own life for the past five years. (Documented in a manuscript that one day, God and agent willing, will be bound up and displayed in a bookstore near you.)  So now I sit and wait in the silence to find out the next part of the story.  Will anyone respond to my letters?  Will we be saying goodbye to New York in a matter of days instead of the months we had budgeted?

In a packed-to-the-gills service last night, Tim told us that happiness–as the world defines it–occurs when we have ordered our circumstances favorably according to our preferences.  Joy is a different creature altogether.  Joy can survive, even thrive, in the midst of both favorable circumstances and dreams deferred.  Don’t I know it. And yet, don’t I always have to relearn and relearn it? Which is why, when the BF called to tell me about the interview he scored, my first thought was, What about all the plans I made here? instead of the more wifely, supportive congratulatory response.  (Still working on letting God use marriage as a way to make me less of a self-centered jerk.  Old habits die hard.)

When I met AW at the wine bar on Friday, I admitted the thing that, as independent New York women, we’re not supposed to admit: I’m so glad I’m not facing all of this alone.  I did it that way once: waving goodbye to everyone, packing up and driving a thousand miles so I could sit in a fourteenth-floor apartment by myself and wonder what the hell I had done.  This time, I’ll ride shotgun to the BF as he drives us toward our wedding. I’ll be leaving behind a Yankee fam but moving closer to my parents, who are so looking forward to releasing that breath they’ve held for five years as their eldest braved the jungles of New York.  I’ll be putting distance between me and some of my best friends, but shortening the gap between me and some of my oldest friends, including a Sis who’s incubating my niece.  There’s so much more give-and-take in the Leaving New York scenario than there was in the Coming to New York scenario because of all that I’ve gained since the moment I arrived to that apartment alone. All of it gained in taking chances and waiting in darkness and bearing uncertainty.

I sent a note to my Personal Encouragement and Advisory Team, all writers themselves, before I headed out to drop my penny in the wishing well on Friday. Two-thirds of them are Southern-located and one is here in New York, but I felt their prayers as if they were all standing beside me at the mailbox.  There are no guarantees when it comes to dreams or publishing, but I have a cross-country U-Haul bill and a years-developed Word document that shows there is a plan, and it is good.  I opened the box and let go.