I had all of these great blog posts in progress for this week.  I was excited to be able to get back to a schedule, back to writing being a set part of my day, both for my blog and to start a new big project.  I thought this week would be about finding some normalcy in all of the change.  But instead, everything changed… again.

On Friday I turned 26.  And let me admit, I had a pretty bad attitude about it.  I won’t go on about birthdays in general (although that was going to be my blog post for Monday) because by the early hours of Sunday morning, lying in the ER, I was just praying I’d see another one.  It started with recurring symptoms that had been going on for a while… I assumed they were stress related.  It’s been a pretty ridiculously stressful time.  But then it was different.  Then I couldn’t breathe, and the pain wouldn’t go away.  I had all of the symptoms of a heart attack, and as I struggled to breathe, my husband rushed me to the ER.

If you’re predicting the outcome, trust me, I was too.  People don’t usually have heart attacks at 26.  And I was stressed. Panic attack, right?  I was sure of it.  I remember enough from my days as a psych undergrad to know that despite the fact I was lazily watching “Bunheads” at the time, panic can manifest itself in a lot of scary with no immediate trigger.  That’s what the nurses assumed as they took my vitals.  It’s what the doctor assumed as she ordered tests to be sure.

Then my EKG came back.  The doctor told me that there was an inconsistency between the two they had done, and started drawing pictures of heart monitor lines.  It seemed that blood wasn’t flowing right to my heart.  I needed to be admitted.  Then she started throwing around words like “bypass” and “surgery” and if I wasn’t already panicking, that’s where it started.

I’ll skip the long recitation… By the next afternoon I still hadn’t slept and I was a mess.  The final consensus is that I have a heart abnormality, but there are no signs of damage.  The abnormality is probably exacerbated by the stress, and because my body doesn’t know what’s wrong, it panics, and presents as a heart attack.  They aren’t sure of this.  I could pay thousands of dollars to find out more… but they don’t know that they’d actually find out more.  And at that point all I wanted was to be at home, in my own bed. So I came home, with answers… but not really.

My husband and I agreed that I would take a few days off of frantically job searching and worrying about our impending homelessness, and instead, would try to somehow forget about the status of life right now.  I would rest.  We wouldn’t talk about anything important.

But that only lasted a few hours.  Because then came the call that COULD change everything… a job.  The kind he’s always wanted.  In a place we never considered living in.  A city much smaller than we planned on, near my hometown.  Could he be there this week?

It could be exactly what we’ve waited for.  At moments it seems like an answer to our prayers, like we’ve finally been through enough and it’s time to move on and start real life.  At other moments, I remember the downsides to small town life, something my husband has never experienced before, and which would be rude awakening to him.  I think of all the plans we had to stay here or to move to the city I lived in before this.  I had apartments picked out in each one.  We knew everything about them… My control freak side starts to panic.

But I’m trying to give that up to someone who knows better than I do, and to trust that what’s meant to happen will happen.  So when I stumbled across the sketch above (lets ignore it being a tattoo…) it resonated with me deeply.  We have to have faith.  So we pack up, and we head off to find out what God has in store for us.  This could just be another dead end.  Or it could be a new beginning.  I’m not sure which I’m rooting for right now… But I’ll let you know what happens.