need the sun to break

I wish I could have taken a picture.  I was driving back to Lexington on US 60 and in my rear view mirror the sky was black and churning.  It was actually hailing and raining over the hospital I had just left.  But in front of me, the clouds had already broken and the sky was blue.  The storm had already passed through where I was going and I was driving into the sun.

I had just quit my job.

Almost two years ago I walked into this community hospital in my home town and landed a job ahead of one hundred other applicants.  It was a job, which would change mine and Judah's lives.  It changed our financial situation, it changed my prospective future, it exposed me to heartbreak, and it taught me about my competence.

Through this job I learned I am a true advocate at heart.

So when it came time to leave, this advocate heart was torn.  I had slowly and all of a sudden learned I was not nearly as safe as I thought, yet I had grown deeply convicted about working in a role where I was allowed to advocate and fight for and protect the people I called my coworkers and my patients and my family.  When it became apparent this was not the priority for some others, I began to search for a way out.

I didn't want to jump ship.  If I had learned anything over my few years as a social worker, I had learned this job is hard.  This job ostracizes you.  This job puts you at risk.  This job will wear you out.  This job will wear you down.  Our education and teaching prior to being hired is different than others' and we arrive to the battlefield prepared differently.  Not better or worse.  But we show up with a different skill set.  To be the only one is isolating and a great struggle.

Looking back on the two years since I began this job, I can see evidence of this struggle in my face.

Jumping ship at the first opportunity would probably just have put me back in a similar situation though, without the stability of years of employment.  We can't just leave because things are hard, I guess I learned.  So when I was offered a couple of opportunities to leave, I decided to wait.

Throughout my life I have also learned how God speaks to me.  And my prayer over the past few months for Judah and I is that God would bring us up and out of the season we've been wading through.  Inevitably when the time came to take a risk, I decided to trust the passion I feel God has placed in my heart, and I made a couple of decisions only a few people understood.

Immediately He blessed those decisions.  Immediately, because I know He knew I needed affirmation, God let me know that He was involved in this process.  Using people from my past and my present to orchestrate opportunities I hadn't expected to have.

Ultimately I accepted a new job right before Judah and I left for vacation, and I put in a three week's notice.  The risk here is so different than I would anticipated.  It's still causing me anxiety, which after all these years I know isn't an indicator of a bad decision.  It's confirmation I've stepped out on the ledge.  I've crawled out to the branches where the fruit is, taking on an adventure and writing part of my story which requires me to be brave.  Here I am, trusting God to put pieces together and use the tools He's given me to create a new life for Judah and me.  

When I left on Wednesday, twenty two months to the day of starting as a social worker in an acute care hospital, I am reminded God asks us to make decisions sometimes long before we are ready to make them.  He can see farther than we can and I have learned the hard way He sometimes asks us to take a different path to avoid whatever was coming around the bend.

Just before leaving one of the doctors told me not to sell myself short.  He was sad to see me go, he said, and kissed my forehead.  Quietly over the last eight months he had watched me, I suppose.  And in his wisdom he had seen me stay longer than I should have.  In every sense of the word. " Don't sell yourself short," he said,"and keep your eyes on the horizon.  If you don't, you'll end up in the trenches. And you don't want to end up there."

And when the rain came, I knew it had come to wash it all clean for me.  Not because more rain won't come.  Not because there aren't more storms ahead.  But for now, while pressing forward, I needed those clouds to break.  To know the narrative I had agreed to was "up and out", even though that climb up the mountain is a harrowing one.

Tomorrow morning I will start work as a case manager for Cardinal Hill, a local rehabilitation hospital in Lexington.  I can be proud of this work.  I hope they will be proud of me.