This experience has been a year and half in the making as far as I have known, but to God it has been the plan all along. Last year, Matt came home from a 3 month deployment to Germany when Russia had invaded Ukraine. When he read the assignment to me and that they needed a weather officer ASAP to fill this EuCom position and as the “always supportive wife” I said well you have to go, you can’t pass up this chance of a lifetime. Don’t worry about us, we will be fine……Now this is what my face portrayed when on the inside I was screaming, I can’t believe this, how am I going to juggle all this, why does he have all the fun. So he left within 2 weeks of applying for the position and I stayed back to hold down the homeschool, baseball playing, church going, serving, social calendar that was our “organized chaos.” I had it all down to a science and burned all 4 cylinders daily! So you can see why I was counting down the 90 days when my partner in crime was back and I could breathe a little again. What I didn’t expect during our last phone call before he flew home was, “ What would you think of moving out here to Germany and me extending my deployment? Oh I am having a meeting with my boss over here to get the full details then I will hop on the plane and come home. Don’t worry, we can discuss it when I get home.”

So many questions funneled and flew around my head. Was this possible? How long? How much would it cost? What about Delta?  What about school? What about the house? What about our life here? How could we do this with 4 children? And even though my head swarmed with those questions and plenty of what ifs?God gave me an almost burst of joyous peace. In my heart I heard, “there is nothing about this I can’t handle.” The I in this statement was not ME. 

So Matt came home and we tried to re-establish a sense of normalcy in the house which was more difficult than I had imagined. I had a hard time relinquishing my single parenting duties and routines that we had become accustomed to while he was away. He tried to jump back in too quickly and began barking military-like orders and trying to establish a sense of paternal role in the household. Our days went back to being slam full, he went back to working overtime at Delta paying off debt and all the while something was stirring in us. Though we loved our lives, God was putting an itch in our socks that we tried to scratch in so many different ways. We felt exhausted, like we just couldn’t get off the hamster wheel with almost no end in sight. Then one day I was in the kitchen and Matt was outside and a thought just popped in my head, “We should sell the house and just do this crazy move to Germany. Why not? As much as we loved our house, it was a little too small and at the end of the day it was just a house. We homeschooled for a reason so why couldn’t we do it in Germany? What an experience for our family? I called Matt inside to tell him this epiphany I had and he just smiled because earlier that day, he had the same thoughts.

We prayed for a few months for this move to Germany. We prayed for God to make it abundantly clear whether we should do this or not. We prayed for peace either way and for discernment for us to make the “right” decision for the family. We prayed that we would obey and not fear, whatever that looked like. We listed out the pros and cons for staying and for going, and tried matching it to scripture to make sure our hearts were in the right place and our decision would glorify God. We knew if our hearts sought after His will then whatever we decided would bring Him glory. So then, and only then, did we start making the long, tedious journey toward our move to Stuttgart, Germany.