Plans

"What brought you to Michigan?"

We always felt a little funny saying a job, considering there were so many people in the auto industry losing theirs and unemployment was so high in this area.

But backtrack to 1999. Hubby was in the military. A promotion that should have happened by all human standards didn't. We were expecting our fourth child and had three children five years old and under. We would soon have four children six years old and under.

We were expecting to no longer have the job security we'd had for the past 11 years. We had to decide whether or not to have Hubby go ahead and look for another job and get out of the military before he was told he had to get out, because at that stage promotion was such a minimal possibility it wasn't even something you could expect to happen.

Hubby decided to wait and see what the next year brought and base his decisions on that. Technically we probably had less than a year. We chose to live out Psalm 46:10. This was October, 1999.

The following July Hubby gets a call literally out of the blue. His promotion is going to happen, and he's being offered a position in the one place that both of us would chose as our top location to go — Scott AFB, which was located in Illinois just across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. This job was a three-year rotation and only came open every three years. (God had this all figured out. No wonder he didn't get promoted the year before!)

Fast forward another four years, Hubby returns from Kuwait and works in St. Louis at a job based here in the Detroit area. He's up here two out of four weeks every month. At the end of this two years, we move to Virginia, not because we want to move, but because we have to move.

God didn't plan for us to stay in the St. Louis area. He knew we would never leave willingly. Once we were in Virginia and Hubby retired (which is a whole drama in and of itself), we looked at other locations for settling down permanently. Namely employment.

Within two days of dropping his retirement paperwork, the men from the Detroit area that he worked with for those last two years we lived in the St. Louis area called him. One of them was retiring. There would be a job opening...

Now we live in the Detroit area. Almost a year ago we met Mrs. Missionary and things fell into place for Sparky to go to Africa. She's felt called to be a missionary since she was seven or eight years old. That's all she's ever wanted to be when she grows up.

Now in October she'll be going to Bolivia with Mrs. Missionary as her chaperone again. All because of God working out a promotion not happening when human beings couldn't explain why it didn't when it shouldn't.