Radical...Who me?

I decided to start this little blog in response to the many questions I have been receiving about the major changes that my husband Murray and I are making in our lives. People have been watching in amazement as we have been packing up and selling our home, and living in temporary quarters.

  A year ago we were a very normal family with a bunch of kids living in a large house in the suburbs and words like  "structured" "stable" and "secure" could definitely be used to describe our life. Work Monday to Friday, church on Sundays and a nice family vacation planned each summer... it had been this way for a long time... 

Now one year later, after a bizarre series of circumstances (some rather tragic), we found ourselves in possession of a very large, very empty nest.. and a desire to make major changes. Going from 6 kids living with us to zero kids living with us, and contemplating how to respond to this wind of change that had blown though our lives... and finally deciding to do something ...well... radical ...

It's not that it was totally unexpected... the first hint of this change coming to our lives was announced during a prayer time, two years ago while we visited some Christians in Alberta who we are deeply connected to. As they prayed for us, they all began to say the same thing in different ways..."God is calling you to step into a big adventure and in preparation for this adventure a major shaking and change will sweep through your life, and it is going to be so big that it will seem like everything that has happened to you before this.. is nothing compared to what you are going through.. but it will launch you into the next faze of your life, and into the amazing plans that God has for you."

I remember thinking after they prayed for us.. "well thats cool".. hmmm.. in hindsight I would have to say.. "If God tells you a major shaking change is coming... don't expect a ride at disneyland.. because you are about to encounter a storm."

And yes.. a storm began to sweep through our lives, and everything was tossed about... relationships, finances, possessions, plans.. all of it. The funny thing however about a storm is that when a storm hits, you have to choose what to hold onto, and it reveals very quickly what is important to you.

The end result of this sweeping storm is that we began to question our "North American" values and mindset, and realized that we were living for many things that were no longer important to us. Possessions and a home being one of those things, and a nine to five safe but structured life being another. And so the end result of all this is that we have decided to give up that old way of living, liquidate a lot of our possessions, and follow after the "adventure" that God has for us... wherever it may lead.

The fact that we have arrived at this place in our thinking and in our beliefs is a minor miracle in it's self. Murray (my husband) and I both grew up in families where our parents worked very hard to move up socially and provide security for them selves and their children. Thus they highly valued home ownership and a secure job with a pension. These values were passed down to us kids, and we really never questioned pursuing the same things... until a few years ago when we began to ask ourselves as many people do in middle age "Is this all there is? Is there something more that we are missing? Are we really living the Christian life as Jesus demonstrated in the Bible, or are we living a North American version of what we think of as the Christian life, where we attend church, and write cheques, but avoid the worst parts of town and leave the uncomfortable and challenging part of the gospel to ... "those who are called to it"...whoever they are... but not us of course.

We had already taken our first tentative steps away from these values four years ago when Murray quit his government job and cashed in his pension in order to open his own business... not so secure anymore.... but we still owned a big house in the suburbs with a lot of equity in it... so we were "safe" in our own eyes, and still doing the North American thing for the most part. 

I mean sure ... a lot of people dream of cashing it all in, and travelling the world.. they may even talk about it... but very few actually do it... it is much more comfortable to hover around the edges of such things, and then go back to your "normal" life... So in some ways, the storm that blew through our life over the last year was a gift... it caused us to really examine  what was important to us.. and that assessment ended up in us making the decision to liquidate, downsize... and embrace some voluntary simplicity... All so that we can be unencumbered enough to pursue the call and dreams from God that await us over the next hill... 

So where are we headed? I'll tell you some of that in my next post...  In this one I simply wanted to answer the question.

Radical... who me?

 and the answer is.. surprisingly ...  YES!