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"I've accepted a transfer," my husband, Wayne, said over the phone. "We're moving back to Houston."
Wayne's words knocked the wind out of me. With a trembling hand, I dialed the numbers of my best friend, my mom, and my sister. No one was home. Unable to hold back my tears, I sank to the floor and surrendered to great heaving sobs.
Five years earlier, the words "We're moving" produced a very different response. Although Wayne and I met and married in Houston, neither of us felt at home there. Our subdivision lacked the hills and mature trees I grew up with in Wisconsin, where my family still lived. I missed them, and Wayne and I both longed for a cooler climate.
Wayne's job as an oil engineer almost guaranteed we'd move within two or three years. But three years stretched into nine. Then one day Wayne called from work. "How'd you like to move to Chicago?" he asked.
Chicago! I'd be only a two-hour drive from my family.
"We'll have trees—and snow!" I exclaimed. Excitement energized us by day and kept us awake at night.
Soon we moved into the house of our dreams. We found a church home right from the start. Our older children started school, and our youngest was born. Life was good. We never, ever wanted to leave Chicago. We joked about leaving claw marks all the way down the highway if forced to leave.
After a couple years, pressure mounted for Wayne to move. Warnings of a transfer became more frequent. He informed me of positions he was considering, always asking my opinion of the locations involved. I paid little attention, choosing to believe God would provide a way for us to stay right where we were. When Wayne mentioned a position in Houston, I thought he was joking. Didn't he remember the nine years we spent trying to escape from there? I didn't take Wayne seriously until the day he called saying he'd accepted the transfer to Houston. And this time, he hadn't asked for my approval.
I felt betrayed, angry, and bitter. I blamed God for moving us—and my husband for taking us back to Houston. When I admitted my rebellious feelings to a neighbor, he said, "Well, Mary, from what I read in the Bible, if God picked the Israelites to be his chosen people, he knows how to handle rebellious attitudes."
Not long after our move, God began to work on my rebellious attitude. Poet Carl Sandburg once wrote, "Life is like an onion. You peel off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep." I wept often as God gently peeled away each layer of negativity.
The first layer was pride. In Chicago, Wayne's job required so much energy he had little left for the kids and me. Eventually I began distancing myself from him to avoid being disappointed every time he was too tired to join us at the beach, watch a parade, or visit my family. Soon I began to believe I ran the whole show while Wayne showed up mainly to eat and sleep.
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