Is the Job Always Better at Someone Else’s House?

I’m off on a retreat this weekend, the Mt. Gilead Women’s Retreat in beautiful Sebastopol, California. We’ll listen to fireman’s wife Susan Farren talk about the things the Lord has shown her through the agonies of living with a man who puts his life on the line everyday. She’s also the mother of five children and folks tell me she’s funny and insightful.

Good, I could use some fun and insight.

I read Farren’s book, The Fireman’s Wife, several months ago in preparation to hearing her speak. I also bought a copy  to share with several precious young women I know. One is married to a firefighter, the other hopes to see her husband become one in the near future. The fireman wife-to-be is still working her way through the book!

One incident stuck out for me. Farren commented about lying awake at night wishing her husband was not a fireman, but in some career that was safer, like an Army soldier. I laughed out loud, remembering a night I lay awake wishing my submarine-serving husband had a more regular job that at least made him contactable–like a fireman!

I guess the grass, or in the case, the job always looks better in someone else’s household.

I’m determined to take a step out of my hectic life this week. To sit and listen to God for once, instead of telling Him about all the things I need to do. It’s ironic, because I will be leading a seminar Saturday afternoon: Turning the Prism: Looking at Your Life’s Circumstances Through God’s Lens.

All those years ago, when I lay awake and wished my husband worked somewhere else,  I needed to remember God ordained the life before me. It was no surprise to God that Bob was out to sea when so many dreadful things happened to me. I needed to learn lessons about growing up, seeing myself as His child, and practicing trust in God. Good lessons. Sometimes I even remember them.

One night, though, circumstances were miserable and as I folded laundry and watched Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News, I felt sorry for myself and decided I needed to get some perspective. “There are lots of jobs worse than engineer on a nuclear submarine sitting on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean while your home life explodes.”

I glanced at the television. “He could be a news reporter. I’d be having all these problems at home, but then would watch him on the news that night from some exotic location like, Iowa. That would be worse.”

The next morning while eating breakfast with the Today Show, they announced a news report from Los Angeles. The reporter was a person I knew very well, indeed, he was a former admirer. I ran to see him closer on the screen and then began to laugh.

God uses every opportunity to catch our attention and to love us with a gentle tug. Here was the person I had just told the Lord the night before, had a worse job than my husband.

And you know what?

He did have a worse job.

And I had the best husband, specifically ordained for me and my circumstances.

How about you? Can you trust that your life is just where God wants it to be?